Who knows your name? Who knows where you live?

The other day someone worked out where I live from a previous post on this blog.

Eeep!

Now I’m reasonably careful online: I’ve written about password security, I know emails are less private than postcards, and I don’t geotag pictures out of an instinctive preference for privacy, and I certainly don’t tweet or blog about going away before I actually go.  So you may think it’s odd that I blog in my own name, but I’ve a professional interest in Web 2.0 and I need to type the type as well as talk the talk.

When we went away a couple of weeks ago, I dropped a very late email in to the folks who deliver our veg to cancel the box for the week. Unfortunately the email addy I used was a benwarsop one, and I am a customer of theirs in my married name.

Impasse…

Or so you’d like to think.

You see, my email sig includes a link to this blog and the top post that week showed  some flowers on my kitchen windowsill.  I thought no harm of it: central Scotland is full of kitchens with views like mine.

I see sunflowers, you see the house opposite

But Ms Holmes was smarter than that.  She knew which day I have my veg delivered from the email and it was easy enough to check the route for someone whose first name was “Ben”.  It was probably a list of 1, but even if it had been more, it was only a matter of comparing the relevant Google Street View(s) with the pic on my blog, and bingo! No veg left to rot for a week, and a happy but rather unnerved Ben.

So if you want excellent organic veg delivered by tech savvy folks, go to GrowWild and say I sent you.  They know both my names now.

And if you don’t want to be tracked down, find somewhere to live that Google Street View hasn’t got to yet. It’s good advice. Property values in places like that will soar.