Allow users to hide connections between accounts

Question

This feature request is inspired by the question on Programmers.SE on whether it is appropriate to ask an interview candidate for their Stack Overflow user.

Stack Overflow is a site aimed at professional programmers, and it is used by some employers and some employees to examine or showcase the candidates abilities. I don't see any problem with that, but there is one aspect I'm a bit concerned about. Certain SE sites are far more private than the professional sites like SO. Anyone that participates in Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Biblical Hermeneutics is likely giving out a significant amount of information about their personal belief or world view to anyone who can connect the user name to the actual person. Another example would be controversial topics on Skeptics or Politics; not everyone would like to give their employer access to that kind of information.

The fundamental problem is that the SE platform does not allow for any separation inside one account. Of course one could create separate accounts for private and professional topics, but that requires a significant amount of clairvoyance and a rather annoying user experience juggling separate browsers to log into different accounts at once. An additional problem is that SE has automatic user merge features that can be triggered by logging into two accounts in the same session. I'm not sure how they work exactly, but I suspect that having your two accounts accidentally merged is a real danger if you are not careful.

There should be a mechanism to hide the connection between SE accounts, without having to use separate OpenIDs. For example, if I would like to use my SO account in job applications, I should be able to separate it from all my other accounts. The separation would only be for the publicly accessible part, moderators could still be allowed to see the connection between accounts. And behind the scenes it would just work as it is now, just without any links between the accounts.

The aspects that would need to be changed that I can think of are

• the accounts tab in the user profile, that shouldn't show any connections for separated profiles
• copying the user profile to other sites should not work for separated profiles
• the network profile should not show the connections between separated profiles
• Area 51 should also not show the profile connections

This separation would not have to be bulletproof, but it should prevent users googling a specific person to make connections the user does not want to make public.

Answer 1

You can already create a second account - using different login credentials - but that does require that you either use different browsers or continually log in and log out to post on the relevant sites. Not ideal and prone to error, and you won't get the association bonus when one of the accounts reaches 200 reputation points.

I like the idea of being able to mark my account on site A as not publicly visible (to non-moderators) on other profiles. This would also mean that no other profiles would appear on my account on said site.

However, I can see a potential problem with the account association bonus. If this were applied to the account then it would become clear that this is a linked account so people would start asking "Why has this account with no other accounts got the association bonus?". I think in this case you would have foregone the bonus if you wanted to keep this account separate.

There's also the "copy profile to all accounts" option to consider. It would have to know which accounts to ignore.

Another solution would be to allow users to create their own site groups. So (for example) SO, UX, Software Engineering and Game Development could be in Group A, while Gaming, SU and AskUbuntu were in Group B and DIY, Cooking and Mechanics were in Group C. Each would only show the other accounts in that group to the public.

Answer 2

I see a potential breach of the CC license if this is not implemented and the software automatically merges accounts that were meant by the user to be separate. To be more specific, merging accounts in such cases amounts to removing the pseudonym which was given by the post author.

The terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license explicitly mention that pseudonyms should be preserved:

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied

If a user goes to the trouble of setting up a separate account and using separate browsers, then that is a strong indication that the separate account is a pseudonym and should be preserved as such. Having a trigger-happy system which may (will?) immediately tell on the pseudonym as soon as the user slips and uses the wrong browser makes for a horrendously complicated user experience.

Instead, the answer is simple - allow users to set up pseudonyms within the system. This means account separation as per Mad Scientist's request.

I understand the need to watch out for sockpuppets and the fact that many duplicate accounts are due to user mistakes. However, the ethos behind this trigger-happy system, which is echoed clearly in this post by Jeff,

what legitimate reason would you need for multiple accounts?

is outdated and obsolete now. The network now contains a number of religious and hobby sites alongside professional sites and being forced to have them all together makes it very hard to use the professional profiles in public.

Personal Productivity, My Yodeya, Christianity, Islam, Biblical Hermeneutics, Politics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Personal Finance and Parenting all revolve around personal matters; I won't even try and list the number of hobby-driven sites for which it should be a personal choice whether to divulge one's participation in them.

Sites like The Workplace and Academia often require anonymity for many good questions to be asked. On the other hand, sites like MathOverflow explicitly encourage their users to use their real names. These goals can be completely incompatible in many real-world cases.

If this is not implemented, then account mergers should come with the possibility to dissociate the account from some of the content, and this feature should be visible and discoverable.

Answer 3

The idea has come up a couple of times on this and similar questions that the obvious solution — allowing users to simply mark particular communities as pseudonymous and cut off all links from those communities' profiles to their main network profile — has a problem when someone with 101 rep and no other accounts joins a site.

At first, this seems plausible. That's really weird, and externally-visible weirdness on a privacy-oriented feature is a bad sign, right? Well, maybe. When you break it down, there are really only two implications.

The first is that users investigating profiles for general community (non-♦) moderation would be puzzled to see 100 rep from site association coming out of nowhere. But once they've seen this a few times and found (on meta or whatever) the actual reason for this, that's not a big deal. And confusing snoopers is not a serious problem. Note that the average user spotting a 101-rep user's posts won't bother checking to see if they have a network account or not; they'll probably assume they do and move on.

The second is that it might be some sort of inherent privacy risk to reveal that this is a pseudonymous account with a main somewhere. Well, not much of one. On most sites that this is relevant, there'd be a fair number of such accounts, so they wouldn't stand out much. And to try to work out which network profile is the hidden master for a given pseudonym? That requires correctly guessing which of hundreds of thousands of network accounts with enough rep for an association bonus this particular one belongs to. Maybe that could be done by textual analysis, but doing so reliably with small sample sizes, ridiculously many authorship possibilities, and the quirks brought in by differing subject matter is likely to be difficult in the extreme… never mind the performance costs of doing that comparison against the aforementioned hundreds of thousands of network accounts. Trying to figure out which sites a given network account has hidden accounts on, and what they are, is similarly impractical.

So as far as I can see, this is all just a red herring. UI-wise and privacy-wise it's no more than a very minor glitch. Actually coding this might be more difficult, but that's another story.