Privacy and Such

Some stuff occurred to me this morning.

I realized that anyone who wanted to, if they had a list of OU students, could easily find me in about ten minutes with only the information I put in my last two entries.

Probably they could do that just with the name info, even. (I think I'll go make that a little less-specific once I'm done here.) [ETA: Done. Should be okay now.]

My naivety is showing, y'think?

Maybe a tad. I think my real problem, when I talk about school on here, is that I don't see myself as living here, even though I do, nine months out of the year. So I watch what I say about my hometown, but then follow that up with completely identifiable info concerning school. Probably not the best of ideas.

But it's also hard to decide where the line is between what's okay to say here in a public entry and what's not. For example, I don't think the fact that I go to OU and am majoring in Aerospace Engineering should be kept out of here, as where I'm living and what I'm studying are directly relevant to my life and would certainly come up even if I tried not to mention it. Yet AE is such an uncommon major that that in itself is already getting us into personally-identifiable territory.

Also, people in communities tend to cut their profs' last names from letters and things that they post. I can see this, for a community, especially since they aren't even saying there where they go to school. But should I be more careful about that here in my own journal? I don't know. It's hard for me, personally, to refer to them by other names than what I know them as, and even if I just used first names or something, it's not like they're not all online on the school website if someone felt like looking.

Thus far, my attempts at privacy have mostly been to keep this from showing up if someone were to Google my real name, which I've managed because that's fairly simple. But to go the other way -- make sure no one can find out who I am by reading this -- that's harder. (Or maybe I'm just bad at it. *shrug*)

So where's the cut-off mark betweek "OK" and "not OK"? Help?

For now, I'm gonna make the school entry friends-only and hopefully that'll make me feel better.

[ETA: Have edited out my professors and roommate from that entry, and made it public again. I'm still not so good at this blogging-and-retaining-privacy thing, but I'm trying. Hopefully, as I get the hang of it, there will be fewer edits. I promise this is the last one for today.]