Saw a post like this on Reddit once and I thought some of the responses were quite interesting.
I collect all sorts of stuff from vinyl records and vintage game consoles to Harley-Davidson dealer t-shirts.
I’m curious about what some of you guys collect, the weirder the better :D
Websites.
Okay, that requires a bit of an explanation. I have the world record for the person who has signed up for the most websites. One day I just found myself on track to holding the record longterm and have since defended it. If I see a new website, I sign up for it, no question about it.
I have two close friends who also collect cave souvenirs. Cave exploring is a hobby of theirs I got them into (despite being unable to keep up with it myself) and they know every cave by heart.
Three questions: How many e-mail addresses do you have and how do you determine which one to use for which website?
How many Spam e-mails do you receive each day?
One email address per email website, so about a dozen. Actually this is useful because some websites, when signing up for them, invalidate some email providers due to spammers flocking to certain ones. A few email addresses are personal, a few I actively use for different websites (the ones that are least likely to be marked as spam), and a few I keep as backup; equal numbers for all three. Ironically the email addresses which are associated with the providers people use for spamming are the ones which themselves are the least likely to receive spam; depending on the email address, the number ranges between no spam a day to a dozen spam letters a day.
It’s a habit that grew on me; I had a habit of branching out and I guess you could say a catch-22 formed. Lots of time to reflect without others which turned into the discovery that I want this aspect of me as long as possible. in this sense, having a world record is like having a kid. Each account of mine online links to others and forms a web, and along the way, it begins to speak for itself.
When signing up, do you use real information at all?
This is way more interesting to me than I would’ve thought.
It depends on the website. Not because I’m deceptive, but because there are some websites that mandate everything about you reflect yourself and some websites that mandate the exact opposite where you use all made up stuff, along with websites that don’t enforce either one (most websites don’t). Fortunately for me, I happen to have a birth name with many variations (Leni itself is a nickname), another name with a few more, and details about me that fall on certain cusps when trying to categorize them. The name thing is why I often seem to go by different names depending on the website I use. It would also require an explanation to those who wish to see how far my world record goes if I didn’t use wholly matter-of-fact information on the websites I use, as, hypothetically, I would need to verify myself on an external level that I am a certain individual, if that would truly work, since, classically, the verification of the world record comes from all the accounts co-identifying as each other in some way.
How often is your data stolen?
I’ve had certain aspects of myself released to the world, but as of yet, no theft of data per se, if we’re talking things like bank details and whatnot. The way I’ve always gone about things provides natural security benefits. There have been times where SWAT made a cameo, thrice actually. I was always wary of them but, though this is going to sound dark, I subconsciously still straddled such lines because of “mental health issues” (I put that in quotes because often people say that dismissively) and me thinking “what a way to test my luck”. Third time they came, they probably knew this because there was a difference in them.
Side note, with that said, I’ll use this opportunity to be the first to confirm that VPN’s don’t protect you from malice, they’re really there for foreigners accessing forbidden content, something I’ve always known, and NordVPN was recently caught empowering others to do what it itself promises not to. Any exchange of cookies is going to give you away, I remember using the DeviantArt forums long ago (I was banned from there without being banned from the whole site) and seeing people constantly ban evade with VPN’s and get banned because each time they ban evade they think they found “a suitable IP” even though a VPN is more akin to having a mailbox disguise than an invisibility cloak. You don’t know who is disguised as a mailbox, but you know enough to consider it strange when you see a mailbox wandering the streets on its own, and you know you can remove their disguise if you’re close enough to them. Most such thievery happens by the wannabe thief just being a detective about it.