- Joined
- Apr 26, 2007
- Messages
- 8,087
A friend of mine showed up to dinner tonight drunk as a lord and morose beyond words after a bad breakup ... wherein my friend's ex registered said friend's name - friendslegalname.com, as an example - and used the site to badmouth said friend.
D'oh.
I was, a) hugely relieved to hear that my friend got the URL back after some acrimonious exchanges,
and,
b) equally hugely relieved once I got home and googled a l'il extensively (c'mon, people, between the wayback machine and modern caches, nothing ever goes away) and found the remains of the site. Though the ex was WAY out of line to basically engage in stalking/harassment, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, hence this PSA, 'cause, you know, I like you guys, too. Best defense, good ... defense? Or is it just an illusory control?
I just registered my name and my husband's, just on general principle, though I manfully resisted to get all the various permutations of circe.us, circe.ca, etc., etc., etc. (circe.etc ...?). Do any of you guys do this? I'm torn between feeling like I haven't done enough - Sally, bar the gate! - and feeling like I may have already gone a whisker further than necessary.
But between remembering how wigged out I was when not one, not two, and not three completely fictitious people with my full name popped up on FB (for context, I am literally the only person in the country with my last name except for my parents) (they turned out to be 'bots) (the FB people, not my parents) ... and my friend's story ... and the whole strange thing with Pandagon yesterday (feminist website hijacked by other, radical, feminists when the original owner made the mistake of letting her registration lapse) ... and the sheer weirdness of somebody using my husband's last name for a Tumblr that's about 20% normal stuff and 80% beyond-freaky (for further context, he's THE only person with his last name, aside from our son) ... I am feeling very possessive about my reputation.
Just me? Or does anybody else worry about this kind of thing? And if so ... what do you DO? I'm definitely now in the camp of feeling like we should all automatically own our legal-name.com addresses, or possibly our legal-name.country-of-citizenship addresses, but since that doesn't seem to be on the horizon ... where does it end? Do we have to buy up every last one to keep from having identities co-opted or even really dumb pranks played?
D'oh.
I was, a) hugely relieved to hear that my friend got the URL back after some acrimonious exchanges,
and,
b) equally hugely relieved once I got home and googled a l'il extensively (c'mon, people, between the wayback machine and modern caches, nothing ever goes away) and found the remains of the site. Though the ex was WAY out of line to basically engage in stalking/harassment, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, hence this PSA, 'cause, you know, I like you guys, too. Best defense, good ... defense? Or is it just an illusory control?
I just registered my name and my husband's, just on general principle, though I manfully resisted to get all the various permutations of circe.us, circe.ca, etc., etc., etc. (circe.etc ...?). Do any of you guys do this? I'm torn between feeling like I haven't done enough - Sally, bar the gate! - and feeling like I may have already gone a whisker further than necessary.
But between remembering how wigged out I was when not one, not two, and not three completely fictitious people with my full name popped up on FB (for context, I am literally the only person in the country with my last name except for my parents) (they turned out to be 'bots) (the FB people, not my parents) ... and my friend's story ... and the whole strange thing with Pandagon yesterday (feminist website hijacked by other, radical, feminists when the original owner made the mistake of letting her registration lapse) ... and the sheer weirdness of somebody using my husband's last name for a Tumblr that's about 20% normal stuff and 80% beyond-freaky (for further context, he's THE only person with his last name, aside from our son) ... I am feeling very possessive about my reputation.
Just me? Or does anybody else worry about this kind of thing? And if so ... what do you DO? I'm definitely now in the camp of feeling like we should all automatically own our legal-name.com addresses, or possibly our legal-name.country-of-citizenship addresses, but since that doesn't seem to be on the horizon ... where does it end? Do we have to buy up every last one to keep from having identities co-opted or even really dumb pranks played?
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