So I wish I was actually alluding to Vikram Seth’s amazing novel, A Fine Balance, but instead I’m going to write about what I consider to be the fine balance between one’s public and private life in the context of an online identity. I was forced to confront this issue when I relaunched my blog last week and received some inappropriate comments.

Innocence and Naivete

Like most users online, I have personal effects (photos, comments, blog posts, etc) hosted on a variety of services across the web. Many of these come up in google searches given the right search terms. I’ve always thought this was not really a big deal, since I assumed anyone searching for me through google would be harmless: either a friend/classmate/acquaintance curious about me, some professional connection (job/alumni/etc), or just some random search terms matching the content of a post here on my blog or other personal content hosted elsewhere. I had always maintained anonymity in some sense, as my name is never listed on this site or other services, but people knowing my name could find this site and other media. This was intentional, so that random people stumbling on this site could only know a limited amount of information not tied to my real life identity, but people who intended to find something about me in particular would find this blog among other things.

Rude Awakening

As part of the pre-wedding process, wedding notifications were sent to some friends and family of my parents. These were not invitations per se, but more like courtesy notifications, something that is common place in the Indian community to inform people of the good news without necessarily inviting them for the event. I had set up a website for our actual invited guests to get information about the reception and wedding and we provided that address in the invitations and emails we sent out. Some individual in the “notified” group decided to start hunting down information about me, my wife and the wedding online.

They stumbled across not only this site, but also the wedding website as well as other content online associated with me like tweets, comments, cached blog postings and photos. I wouldn’t consider this a big deal until they started posting negative comments to this blog, specifically mentioning my parents and myself in inappropriate ways. They even claimed to be from Bangalore, when in fact my logs showed they are in the Seattle, WA area.

Possible Responses

I immediately started doing some “reverse stalking” to try to determine who was harassing me. This led me to discover the commenter’s lie, claiming to be from Bangalore when in fact they were in the Seattle, WA area. I drafted a nasty response telling the person off, but decided to hold off before sending it. In the end, I decided no response was best for now. I also contemplating contacting their service provider to report them for harassment.

The next day I received another harassing comment, factually incorrect again and this time it contained a threat.

Course of Action

At this point, I decided not sending the email was the right idea, and started researching ways to block this individual from learning more about me. I immediately went through the services I use and locked down access to photos and other information from anonymous guests. I also did a little digging to learn how to implement IP blocking on Apache so I could at least temporarily block this user from coming back to any of my online properties and learning more about me or leaving harassing comments.

I have enough information to contact the harasser’s service provider and report them. If another contact is made in any way, shape or form, I will report them and consider any further steps. It’s unfortunate but also ridiculous that someone can not only do what they are doing but also think they are ‘well-wishing’ along the way as indicated by the content of their comments. Clearly they are suffering from some mental lapse.

Final Thoughts

For any of you reading this who have public photos, posts, comments, information, etc, I would suggest strong controlling access to all of this information. I’ve heard of online stalkers and harassers but never really considered myself as a possible victim so I never made the effort to prevent something like that from happening. I consider myself an intensely private person with respect to certain aspects of my life but relatively public otherwise. This whole incident has moved me in the direction of being more private. That said, I still plan to write here on a wide variety of topics in my life and still post semi-personal information, but I plan to be more vigilant in going after anyone who makes me feel uncomfortable in doing so with harassing comments and threats.