Authors have been using pseudonyms for almost as long as publishing has existed, for various reasons. Victorian George Eliot reportedly chose a male pseudonym because no one would have taken her literary creations seriously if they knew she was a woman. J.K. Rowling wrote her crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling as Robert Galbraith, to avoid contamination from her Harry Potter fame. Male authors of romance sometimes choose a female-sounding pen name to deal with the widely-held notion that men can’t write romantic fiction. Likewise, women writing thrillers may opt for a masculine or gender-neutral pen name. Many authors who write in multiple genres use different pen names for each, with the goal of building separate brands and reducing reader confusion.

Of course, for those of us who write sexually explicit material, a pseudonym may be more than just a convenience or a tool for maximizing sales. There’s a good reason why so many erotic works are attributed to the prolific Anonymous. In some countries, creating and selling erotic content is literally a crime. Even in nations that supposedly guarantee free speech, society often treats erotic authors or artists as psychologically deviant or dangerous to youth. We walk a fine line almost everywhere. Staying on the safe side of the law, avoiding being stigmatized or black listed, almost always requires that we publish under a false name. Furthermore, it’s essential that we keep our true identities secret from all but the narrowest group of trusted individuals where disclosure cannot be avoided, such as our publishers or accountants. Even our families may not be aware of our hidden lives as purveyors of the prurient.

Unfortunately, technology has made the preservation of anonymity almost impossible, and the situation is getting worse all the time. Back in 2012 I wrote a series of columns for ERWA called “Naughty Bits: The Erotogeek’s Guide for Technologically-Challenged Authors”. (You can download the entire series as a free ebook here.) One of those columns discussed some of the measures you can take to protect your identity and your privacy. Everything I said in that article is still true. However, even if you adhere to all my suggestions, you are still at significant risk.

Since 2012, computers have gotten even better at learning patterns and making connections between seemingly disparate items buried in huge amounts of data. You may see this discussed in the media under the general headings of “Big Data Analytics”, “Deep Learning” or “AI” – Artificial Intelligence. In fact, there’s not much real intelligence behind these processes, just extremely effective algorithms for sifting through massive amounts of information to discover previously hidden structure. These algorithms were already being explored in 2012, but there have been two important changes since then:

• Computers have become faster and cheaper than ever, and these high powered computational capabilities are available to anyone via commercial cloud services.
• The explosion of mobile applications and digital services has made nearly everyone’s data footprint a lot larger than it was in 2012.

Almost all these computational methods have the property that they become increasingly powerful and accurate as the size of their input data sets grows. Privacy through obscurity is a thing of the past.

As a consequence of these developments, even digital activity that you undertake anonymously (for instance, without logging in) can be easily linked to a well-known identity. This is a significant issue for responsible research. For instance, sensitive medical records used to investigate lifestyle correlates of health problems may be stripped of all personal identification (“anonymized”) to meet privacy restrictions. However, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that by combining multiple anonymized data sets, individual identities can be recovered.

Researchers may view this as a problem. Businesses see it as an enormous opportunity. Personalized, targeting marketing is demonstrably more effective than broadly designed, generic efforts. The more a business knows about you, the more they can influence you — not just what you buy, but how you think about them, how you talk about them, what you share with your friends. Meanwhile the data sets available to business becomes broader, richer and more informative every day,

Do you want a demonstration? Go to Google image search, https://images.google.com. You might not have realized that you don’t need to use keywords for image searching. If you click on the camera icon, you can search using a picture as the search key.

Click on the camera, then put the following into the URL box:

http://www.lisabetsarai.com/lisabetimages/04Assistant.jpg

Then click on “Search by Image”. The results are labeled as “domestic short-haired cat” and many similar photos show up on the results page, as well as articles about cats.

You may think this is a bit crude (most of the cats don’t have double paws, like mine did!), but it’s only going to improve over time. How long do you think it will be before it’s possible to find every personal selfie you’ve ever posted? (My estimate: two years from now.)

If you use Facebook, here’s something else to try. Login to Facebook. Then in another browser tab, go to a hotel booking site such as Booking.com. Don’t log in (if you have an account), but search for hotels in San Francisco, and click on a few results to look at the details.

I’m willing to bet that within the next twenty four hours, Facebook will be showing you travel ads about San Francisco.

Now, maybe you don’t care. Maybe you want to see ads that reflect your current interests, even if that means that the different sites or apps you use are exchanging information without your explicit permission. If you’re an erotica author who uses a private pseudonym, though, I’d guess that you don’t want Google or Facebook connecting the dots between your author persona and your real world identity, revealing to your boss or your students or your church congregation that you’re actually Lulu Pinkcheeks, award-winning author of spanking erotica.

So what can you do about this? How can you reduce the risks?

I’m assuming you’re already following my recommendations from the earlier article. If not, start there. Below you’ll find additional precautions you should take, now that it’s nearly 2019.

Maintain separate login credentials for every site or digital service you use. Do not ever use a social media account (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to log in to a third party site.

Never maintain two accounts on the same social media platform, one for your real world identity and one for your author identity. In the real world, I use Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t have an account on either as Lisabet. On the other hand, as an author I use Pinterest and Twitter.

Use a completely different computer for your writing-related work than you do for your other work. This may seem extreme, but today’s browsers and applications save large amounts of contextual information which can be used to link your two identities. Using separate computers also reduces the risk of errors, e.g sending an email from your author identity to someone in your real-world contact list.

You might be thinking, “I don’t have the money for multiple computers.” In fact, what I do is to use different virtual machines A virtual machine acts like a totally separate computer (and can have a different operating system than your native computer), but shares the hardware with its host machine. An additional advantage of virtual machines is the ability to have them reset back to a known state every time you shut them down. This can also help protect against malware.

By the way, the recommendation above also applies to your mobile devices. Don’t mix real world and author accounts, data or business on one device. In fact, mobile devices are significantly more vulnerable to data leaks and data theft than desktop devices, because the mobile network protocols are less secure and because app stores do not investigate or stringently police violations of privacy by the apps they host. (I can provide references to support this claim if you don’t believe it.)

Consider encrypting your author-related files. “Encryption” is a process that protects your data from being understood by malicious third parties, by translating it into a form that cannot be read by anyone without the encryption key. It’s comparable to keeping your information in a secret code. You can set up your computer so that it encrypts the full contents of a disk whenever the machine shuts down. This protects you if your computer is lost or stolen.

Consider using an anonymizing service. One problem that will remain, even if you use different computing devices as recommended above, is that your public IP address—the unique number that identifies you on the Internet—will very likely remain the same regardless of which computer or virtual machine you use, since this comes from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Thus it is possible to connect activity from the two different machines. Furthermore, your IP address will often tell an Internet application where you are located, since different countries are allocated different blocks of addresses.Anonymizing browsers, such as TOR, solve this problem by relaying your communications through different servers, to hide your actual IP address and location.

By now your head is probably aching. “I don’t want to worry about this,” you’re thinking. “It sounds so inconvenient!” You’re completely right.

In fact, increased convenience is one of the ways we’re seduced into giving away our personal data. It’s far more convenient to use your Facebook login than to create (and manage) a new account for each new website or service you use. It’s more convenient to wave your phone in front of reader and deduct money from your digital wallet than to carry cash or a credit card, even though you’re at much greater risk of being hacked. You might find it more comfortable to keep your mobile GPS location service enabled all the time, so you can quickly do online navigation, even though that means that your detailed movements are being tracked and saved.

Trying to maintain your anonymity is inconvenient. It takes thought and work. However, for me, living in a foreign country with stringent anti-pornography laws, the alternative is too dangerous to risk.

By the way, you may think I’m paranoid, but as it happens I’m a computer professional in real life. I can provide solid documentation for all the claims I’ve made in this article. Just get in touch.

~ Lisabet