Personal information on the internet

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There are too many naive and innocent souls who put too much information about their true identity on the internet. It may be an illusion that one is anonymous on forums like this but I think it is unwise to put personal information like pictures of yourself and sometimes even home addresses and phone numbers on a public medium like the internet. You'll never know what other people are going to do with it and what unforseen consequenses this may have with regards to your present- and future life. That is why I am never going to post a picture of myself on an internet forum, let alone personal information like my address, phone number, personal e-mailaddress, the exact name of the city I live in and what have you on forums or elsewhere on the internet. It may be fun to look at the pictures of others on a forum like this but at the same time I think it's not the most sensible thing to do. People are often making the same mistake on Facebook and I think it ultimately harms someone's privacy in ways that can be very unpredictable so be careful with what you are doing on the web!

I have shared al lot of personal stuff with everyone who visits this forum and I am pretty sure that there are some people out there who may have identified me which is bad and weird enough as it is. However, I don't want the whole world to know who I really am. Besides, I don't think I am that important and interesting anyway which is good and very realistic.

I agree. That's exactly the reason why I don't give my personal information here on WP. Although I believe most people on WP are good people, there is no guarantee that it's absolutely safe. So I give as little personal information as possible.

I'm actually quite paranoid about being identified on WP by someone that I know personally IRL. So I never mention certain things regarding me such as my ethnic background and age.

But it helped an old kid acquaintance to find me, and become a new friend, on common knowledge of dyspraxia/the spectrum that we had not realised 30 years ago. Ain't that a value in being publicly findable?

Though not on every site, of course in some places you wanna post with an anonymous background.

I think it depends on the information. I wouldn't give out my address (well my city I am fine with), phone numbers, etc. I am fine with giving a picture. To me, if someone doesn't put a picture up, or isn't willing to show someone who they class as a friend, then they are a fake and not to be trusted. So what if people may recognise you somewhere, people see people they know all the time.

And to clarify, I don't put a picture of myself up here as I don't want people knowing I have Aspergers until I get to know them. I am not ashamed of it or anything like that, it is just that I want people to get to know me for me, and not as the person with Aspergers. I put a pictures of myself up on other social sites. I never put those revealing pics up lol.

If I see a relative or friend posted their address/phone on Facebook, I'll call them up and yell at them probably. Why would Facebook even prompt you to put those up?

I dont like putting my birthday on WP, but its neccesary for my age to show up, plus I live in a big city so that doesn't really matter.

I wanted to put my picture as my avatar (even thoguh I know I look awful), but I dont use that exact picture on any other site. Each photo of me I put up goes on one site, but since my facebook profile is completely private settings it might be irrelevant.

I just put my handle, city of residence and date of birth. Everything else is private.

I wouldn't want to post a picture of myself on WP, just in case someone from my family came on the internet and found it. Nobody in my family really knows about WP and how much time I spend on it. Sometimes on Google searches some threads from WP spring up, even if you're not looking for anything related to Autism, or hardly related. I wouldn't even really want to post a picture of myself in members discussion either, just in case somebody I know offline (could be anybody, from an acquaintance, to somebody I knew from school, to a person I know today) could have a relative with Autism or could of had mild AS themselves and decided to join WP and then find a picture of me and think, ''oh, I recognise that person, oh I know who it is!'' then read all of my posts. It's just best to keep private, and write information what's enough to explain to other members here what sort of a person I am and everything, but not enough to get anyone from my offline life having a good guess of who I am.

Sometimes on ''why do people look at me when I'm out?'' threads, I write monologues about why I get looked at and how I dress and act that you would think should hide my inner self to a great extent, and some people have asked me to post a picture of myself so they can identify what could be wrong with me what draws people's attention on to me so much. But I prefer not to do that, even through a PM. I know people are just trying to be helpful which is good, but I just don't want people here knowing what I look like, just in case it's a local person who might recognise me or something. Who's to know who is a stalker and who isn't?, no offense to anybody here, I could be a stalker for all you know, although I'm not but just saying.