What did I just do!!!

[AmberM]

So in talking to my therapist this week, and I decided I am doing nothing why not just create the profile and do nothing else. Well it forced me to put in my mobile number to activate it, and now I am getting all the suggestions of my current profile's friends. I did this in an incognito window, so hopefully no tracking cookie would catch it was me. I am not sure what to do, do I bail out and hunt for the delete button or do I just move forward and say if someone finds it, hope it is locked down enough.All it currently has is names, pronouns of they/them and no picture, everything else is hidden (I think).

 

Oh what did I just get myself into ....

[Jani]

If you are speaking about FB, then yes there is cross tracking galore.  As to how to handle it now, it depends on what your overall plans are for coming out to everyone.  As you didn't post a photo many of your "other" contacts may not catch on.  

[AmberM]

Yeah, I am talking about Facebook and I feel like I should have known better that their data seekers are smarter than just using incognito, in hindsight I should have used my backup laptop and cleared out my session cookies and all that.

 

My plan is to slowly come out to a few people at a time, at which point I will offer them the choice of {public name} or Amber to befriend. Regarding photos, I am torn on what to do. My therapist things I should try a make over session (or a few to get it right) and then do a photo shoot of sorts. I both like this idea and dread it as it involves the real me unfiltered. Then there is a part of me that says I can use a snapchat picture with the fem filter on, and that will be harder to notice, but not impossible. What is difficult is I have work friends on my Facebook, and I am not ready to be out at work yet.

 

I really just wanted to build a dummy profile today, build in the amount of truthiness that I want, or that keep me anonymous as possible until let's say December/January time I might be out at that point more socially. I might keep the {public name} profile around for work acquaintances until I do work. I already don't post much to Facebook, why change it now I guess.

[KathyLauren]

If you are concerned about Facebook's promiscuity, I would suggest deleting that profile and starting over with more precautions.  Right now, all your existing contacts will start getting recommendations along the line of, "If you know <deadname>, you will want to be friends with Amber."  FB already knows that you and your old account are related.  That is something you want to avoid.

 

I have a transition profile that I wanted to keep separate from my regular one.  I used a different browse to avoid cookie sharing, and I made sure not to friend anyone who was a friend of my old identity, nor anyone who had a friend in common with my old identity.  The only exception was my wife, but she allowed me to police her friends list to avoid any contacts in common.

[KathyLauren]

Oops!  I meant to say, "I had a transition profile...", rather than "I have..."

[AmberM]

I feel like I have a few saving graces right now. So part of me is hoping that will protect me for the moment at least. First no profile picture, second I am using my middle name as my last name, third I am not giving much in the way of information on my profile yet. I don’t know how I am going to handle it all yet, like my work friends on there. Part of me wants to just be out by the new year and move in with my life. I just want to make sure it is in my terms.

[AmberM]

@KathyLauren When you were out, did you keep the transition profile or did you just update your old profile? I am torn on this one still in the long term, because once I am out fully, what history I have on the old one may be kind of nice, but I can also see where it can also be damaging with some of the memories that may come up.

 

I will take your advice though and change to using two different browsers, one for Amber, and one for {public name}. That should help keep the divide better.

[KathyLauren]

@QuestioningAmber When I came out on Facebook, I asked my friends on the transition profile to friend my old profile.  Then I deleted the transition profile and renamed and re-gendered the old profile.

 

I had history on the old profile that I wanted to keep, and many more friends there, so it was less hassle to do it that way.  I did find a few photos of the old me on other pages that were tagged with my name.  They ended up showing a bearded guy tagged as Kathy.  I untagged those pictures.

 

I am not stealth, so I don't mind if people scroll back through my history.  Just today, I got 'friended' by someone I knew 40 years ago. 

[AmberM]

@KathyLauren I think that is the trouble I am having. I kind of want to be stealth, just be another woman. I know that I should be proud of who I am and the journey that I am on. Just publicly, I don't want a chance to have my safety and security compromised. Maybe that is something that is gained with time and experience.

[DeeDee]

@QuestioningAmber I have an old PAYG sim that I put in an old phone that still holds a charge, it lets me keep things separate, though saying that, as Dee I keep away from FB. I have profiles in a couple of forums and my Amazon, GMail, twitch, discord and YT are all under Dee, so I have two different chrome accounts on my PC and 2 different profiles to log in between on my laptop to make sure they do not leak between each other.  When I come out to my work, I will come out on FB, I expect a combination of hearts and de-friending in equal measure. Cest la vie.

[Bri2020]

It's almost impossible to keep social media accounts seperated and an amazing amount of work to keep them that way as @DeeDee  just said above.  There's a decent enough chance that you will out yourself by mistake, which you know, is kinda like having someone rip the bandaid off. lol.  Basically you have to have a seperate phone number and use a browser that you cleared the cache completely and keep it clean by not using that to log into any other accounts.  You have to decide if all the stress and worry about people finding the new account is worth it.  I gave up and just deactivated my dead name account and then started from scratch but was 80% out at the time anyways

[AmberM]

So luckily nobody has sent me a message or tried to friend my new account yet from my friends, so I think I panicked, when it was just a small blip. I am so glad nothing really bad happened. I actually even put my friend's into groups on my <<deadname>> account to make it easier when I come out in waves. Close friends will get the courtesy of an email explaining it, others will possibly just get a generic coming out post once I have come out to those that I wanted to individually.

 

I do look forward to having friends on my new account though

[Heather Nicole]

The people behind the Firefox web browser have been publicizing their "Facebook Container" add-on: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/welcome/7/

 

If you are looking to go down the path of keeping two FB accounts totally separated, it may be worth using that, especially on the "secret" account. I would not recommend using it as a replacement for the other precautions you and others have mentioned above, but it should help provide an extra backup layer of security.

[Rowan.]

Hiya QuestioningAmber,

 

The method I use to avoid issues like this is to create a new user account on the operating system level. This way I can use the same browser but cookies are not shared. I have a "Rowan" account and I renamed my other account "Werk" because I work on my machine. This has the added benefit of helping me achieve better life-work balance too. When I'm logged into the "Rowan" account I have all my new accounts bookmarked and I my fingertips. Likewise when I log into "Werk" all my professional and dead name accounts are bookmarked and easily accessible to me. Using two operating system accounts can really help to avoid accidental crossposting.

 

Hope this helps,

Rowan