I’ve written this post fifty times, all from different angels. There’s a post saved in my drafts where I drop the F-bomb about thirty times, and then another one where I’m all vague about why I stopped blogging for a bit.

But here’s the truth.

I found out Boy- Roommate, who shall never be…

This is an interesting situation in a whole load of ways. I left a reply on your blog, but I wanted to elaborate on some points.

Firstly let’s get some SCIENCE out of the way:

The story of the program to scan the internet for anything produced by IP address is bullshit (theoretically possible if he works for the government/your ISP). I hope you’ve changed your passwords, scanned your PC for keyloggers and other malware. Does this guy run the network (ie have access to the router) in your house? There are lots of ways he could know about your blog, but “being able to scan the internet for anything produced by your IP address” is pretty fucking unlikely. It’s certainly a good story to tell you to make you attempt to stop covering your tracks though.

Ok now for some ETHICS commentary: what a fucking douche bag this guy is. The conduct here is pretty incredible. But having said that (and not excusing his behaviour in anyway) there is a not-so-small matter of privacy.

You are publishing a blog. A blog you try to keep anonymous, but as you have found out privacy on the Internet is a non-trivial problem. If you are publishing stuff there is always a chance someone you know will find it and also work out your identity. As you are unfortunately finding out, what they choose to do with this information is up to them. That’s generally the thing with information you put out onto the public domain: it’s in the public domain.

The thought of what happens should someone discover your blog is something everyone who has an blog (anonymous or not) needs to think about. If you want or need to keep it anonymous, you need to disguise a lot of things and perhaps be misleading about others. You also need to be pretty damned sure that your computer is secure, the network your computer is on is secure… and so on and so forth.

Or you can just accept some degree of anonymity, and have a clear idea of what you would do should your blog become common knowledge to people you know.

My own blog is semi-anonymous. I don’t go to extreme lengths to hide it. This also means there are a whole world of topics I just don’t write about. That’s the trade off.