What would you do?

[K90]

I recently seem to have upset someone here. I wanted to confess my sins and maybe get some other's opinions on this.

I was talking to someone who will not be named in PM's and enjoying the conversation as you do. This is where I guess i may have overstepped. I got curious and googled there username and immediately got results that to me seemed to match up alarmingly closely with things they had mentioned to me.

I want to be as clear as I can I had no intention of using anything I found for any purpose.

Anyway I thought about it for a while and was worried that bringing it up might make me look bad but i ultimately decided I had to let them know. I sent them a private message detailing the search term I used and the results I was concerned about and suggested that it might be wise to make a new account and retire this one. I did my best to reassure them that i would not mention this to anyone and said that I hope if they make a new account that they would message me again.

They got back to me and stated that the results I was seeing were not actually associated with them which is great news but they were quite upset nonetheless.

That's fair, it was an invasion of privacy and I'm not proud of it and I won't do it again. If I wanted to know more I should have just asked them and let them share what they wanted to share.

I am curious however how others would judge me for this and what you would have done if you had put yourself in this situation.

How do people feel about this? How would you feel if someone looked you up and sent you a message like this? Have you ever looked someone up? If you did and you found something is it better to tell them or leave them be?

Soul searching and need help

 

[pes]

How do people feel about this? How would you feel if someone looked you up and sent you a message like this? Have you ever looked someone up? If you did and you found something is it better to tell them or leave them be?

You have to assume people do that. For several reasons. If you are a woman, there will be people trying to stalk you from the moment they discover you have a frontal orifice between your legs.
In other cases the people that hate zoos might have an incentive to dox us.
Or it is out of curiosity.
So it is up to you to actually separate those identities well and make sure you are not googleable.
I would obviously not be happy about someone discovering more about my identity and I would try to get rid of that information. But it would scare me too.

 

[K90]

You have to assume people do that. For several reasons. If you are a woman, there will be people trying to stalk you from the moment they discover you have a frontal orifice between your legs.
In other cases the people that hate zoos might have an incentive to dox us.
Or it is out of curiosity.
So it is up to you to actually separate those identities well and make sure you are not googleable.
I would obviously not be happy about someone discovering more about my identity and I would try to get rid of that information. But it would scare me too.

Thankyou for your input, it's nice to get a mods perspective too.

I'm not sure if I frightened them, they claim I didn't but I guess I would be a bit scared if it was me no matter what they said..

If you were to look someone up, not saying you would but if you did and you found something like that what would you do? Would you tell them?

 

[pes]

It depends on how well I knew that person or whether I would care.
We delete private information because people dox themselves on the forum almost daily.
If they were a friend, I would tell them too.

 

[HelloItsMe23]

At first I was leaning towards thinking it was messed up that you went searching, but thinking about it harder you really should be making sure you ARENT searchable. Like using a username that is used nowhere else and not posting things that you’ve posted anywhere else and using a completely different email than your regular ones. If it were me I’d want to know if someone found anything on me and honestly you’d have ultimately done this person a favor if you turned out to be right about their identity because they would need to fix that issue ASAP

 

[labsareawesome]

First let's make a distinction between how things are versus how things should be. With that out of the way, it's fairly inevitable that people will get curious and look up things, whether it's here or on Linkedin or whatever. So, you have to be pretty careful about identifiable stuff. For one thing, using the same username here as you do everywhere else is a bad idea, since it's searchable from the outside. I remember a guy who did that at BF and asked if they could delete his account, and the administrators told him tough luck.

Anyway, whoever this was surely was shocked, but you did him or her a favor by pointing out a big security problem.

 

[BrotatoChip]

Anyway, whoever this was surely was shocked, but you did him or her a favor by pointing out a big security problem.

Yeah, definitely this. They should be glad you wanted to give them a heads up, but it would definitely be jarring for them I'd imagine. Maybe give them a bit of time to think it over and see if they come to the realization you were trying to watch their back rather than stab it.

 

[K90]

Yeah, definitely this. They should be glad you wanted to give them a heads up, but it would definitely be jarring for them I'd imagine. Maybe give them a bit of time to think it over and see if they come to the realization you were trying to watch their back rather than stab it.

Thanks I really hope so

 

[Sumpup]

I found some guys from here on another app after about 20 mins. I pmed one of them and after some small talk cited how easy it was for me to track them down just by cross referencing posts they've made.

Over the next few weeks , one changed his name and specific posts they made about locations or other identifying posts got deleted.

Sometimes it's better to say something. I'm not a very smart cookie , so if I can find you that easily, thats not a good thing.

It's sometimes the ones that should know too. Like unrelated topic , friend of a friend that was big on the "silk road" a dozen or so years ago. He worked in cyber security, had air dropped laptops, secure encryptions. The whole 9 yards. I came across his real government name on a escort website. So I got my friend to reach out and ask if that was him or someone using his name. It was him , his literal response was , "oh what's illegal about being an escort "

There were others that used encryption keys to speak securely, crypto for anonymous transactions, but then they'd send a non encrypted sms message from their personal real phone number like " did you get the package " ?

Like what the fuck are you thinking?? Like actually??

I have a whole past life filled with countless stories like this.

 

[G4mp1c]

I'd want to be told if I was searchable and I'd much rather it be from you showing genuine concern than finding out from a dox or something. Anyone would be in a blind panic after hearing something like that, they will come around and realize they were super lucky it was you who told them. You absolutely did the right thing

 

[K90]

Thank you all, feeling better about it hopefully it all works out in the end