On Compartmentalization
This is a topic I've been meaning to write about for a long time but keep putting off, maybe because it's harder to discuss in the abstract than most of the things I write about here. It touches on how I use the internet, how I think about identity online, and some lessons I learned the hard way a number of years ago. I'll try to keep it practical.
The basic idea of compartmentalization is simple: you keep different parts of your life separate. Your work life and your personal life. Your public-facing presence and your private one. The people you interact with in one context don't necessarily need to know about the other contexts. This isn't a new concept — people have always behaved differently at the office than at the dinner table — but the internet has a way of collapsing those boundaries if you're not deliberate about maintaining them.
I've been careful about separating my online presence from my offline life for longer than most people have been thinking about it. That's not a boast. It's more an accident of timing and circumstance. I started thinking seriously about this stuff in the early days of my internet use, before social media made it feel normal to attach your full legal name and photograph to every opinion you've ever held. Back then, most people used handles and pseudonyms by default. The shift toward "real name" policies on platforms happened gradually, and by the time it became the norm, I'd already decided it wasn't for me.
The practical side of compartmentalization isn't complicated, but it does require consistency. Different email addresses for different purposes. Not cross-linking accounts. Being thoughtful about what information appears where. Not using the same username across services — that's a surprisingly common mistake, because it makes it trivial for anyone to map your activity across platforms. A dedicated search and ten minutes of patience is all it takes.
I realize this sounds tedious, and it is, a little. But it becomes habit. I don't think about it much anymore, the same way I don't think about locking the front door when I leave the house. It's just a thing you do.
The question people sometimes ask is: why bother? If you're not doing anything wrong, what's the harm in having a unified online presence? I used to find this question irritating. Now I just find it naive. The harm isn't theoretical. I've seen what happens when someone's information gets compiled by strangers with too much time and unclear motives. A few years back, someone I knew — a fairly private person, no public profile to speak of — had their home address, workplace, daily routine, and family members' names assembled into a document and circulated in an online forum. The pretext was trivial. A disagreement in a hobbyist community. The consequences were not trivial. They moved. Changed jobs. It took the better part of a year for things to settle down.
That experience — watching it unfold, helping where I could — changed how I think about this subject. Before that, my interest in privacy was largely philosophical. Afterward it became practical in a way I couldn't un-learn. You can tell people that information exposure is a real risk, but until they've seen the machinery of it up close, it remains abstract. I wish it had stayed abstract for me.
One of the most underappreciated aspects of compartmentalization is name separation. The name you publish under doesn't have to be the name on your lease. That's not deception — it's basic operational hygiene. Writers have used pen names for centuries. Performers use stage names. The idea that your internet presence must be tethered to your government-issued identity is a recent invention, driven mostly by platforms that profit from making you identifiable. There's no moral obligation to cooperate with that.
I'm not suggesting everyone needs to operate under a pseudonym. For most people, basic precautions are sufficient: don't volunteer information unnecessarily, use different credentials for different services, think twice before connecting your real name to an opinion that might attract the wrong kind of attention. The goal isn't anonymity — it's reducing the surface area that's available to anyone who decides to come looking.
The surface area metaphor is one I think about a lot. Every piece of information you put online is a point on a map. Individually, each point is harmless. But enough points, and someone can draw the outline. Your neighborhood from a geotagged photo. Your employer from a LinkedIn profile. Your daily schedule from check-in posts. Your real name from a domain registration. Each data point is innocuous in isolation. The compilation is where the danger lives.
I keep my own map sparse on purpose. This site exists. A few other things exist. They don't connect to each other in obvious ways, and they don't connect to the parts of my life that I'd prefer to keep out of search results. That's a deliberate choice, maintained over years, and I don't think it's unreasonable.
There's a school of thought that says this kind of caution is paranoid. I understand why people say that. If nothing bad has happened to you, the precautions look like overkill. But insurance looks like a waste of money too, right up until the moment you need it. I'd rather have the boundaries in place and never need them than need them and not have them.
Maintaining separate contexts online isn't paranoid. It's just prudent. It costs very little, it becomes second nature with practice, and it preserves something that, once lost, is almost impossible to recover: the ability to choose who knows what about you.
That feels worth protecting.
— K. Vadala