Hunter's Blog

What the hell happened to Internet privacy?

2026-06-15

About 8 months ago, for no particular reason, I quit drinking coffee.

I had been working from home for 4 months, having about a pot of coffee per-day (roughly 5 cups), and in October of 2025, I started using less coffee grounds in my coffee maker, going all the way down to 2 tablespoons, some cinnamon, and a teaspoon of turmeric. I realized my caffeine intake was low enough that I could probably get by with tea instead, so I switched to that. And after a few weeks of tea, I started to forget to make it in the mornings. Some days later, I realized I had broken my yearslong caffeine addiction, without even really trying that hard.

It's surprising how quickly something can change, even if you once thought it was established, permanent, [insert synonym for "unchanging" here]. Here are some of the earliest lessons in Internet safety I remember learning, in elementary school in the mid-to-late 2000's:

• Never use your real name online
• Don't tell anywhere where you live
• Use a fake birthday, e.g., the first of the month

These are good guiding rules for children, and I wish I could follow them more closely as an adult. But I can't; my career as a software engineer demands that I maintain an online portfolio and more LinkedIn connections than I can handle.

Using an Internet-friendly numbered list, let's take a look at these rules, and how I've broken them over and over and over again.

1. Never use your real name online

Well, you're on a website with my real name, which links to my Github and LinkedIn accounts, both of which use my real name. And when you search the web or ask an AI assistant about me, you can pretty quickly narrow down which "Hunter Gallant" they're discussing. As far as I can tell, I'm the only Hunter Gallant who's a software engineer who went to Dartmouth.

And this is a rule that I intentionally broke. For my career, I had to put my real name on LinkedIn, so HR and background-check companies could make sure I was a legitimate applicant. Less strictly necessary is adding my name to my GitHub, and making a personal web site. Technically, I don't need this site to land a position at a decent company. But in today's job market, every advantage helps.

There is a contigent of people who naturally post their life online. Before there was any money to be made, before any job opportunities, people were making blogs, posting videos, creating all sorts of content. I'm not one of those people; it's just not really what I want to do. I want to make cool little projects and share them with friends and family. Maybe if it's cool enough, I'll publish it online for others to see. Having my real name attached to my LinkedIn, and being told by (former) employers to repost specific company events, or make a particular recruiting post; I hate that.

Now, the conundrum here is that this shift in culture has annoyed me enough to write a rambling blog post about it, and leave it up in public, online. I've fallen victim to one of the classic blunders.

2. Don't tell anyone where you live

I feel like I don't break this rule too often. Perhaps the closest I come to breaking this rule is stating that I live in Arlington, Virginia in my LinkedIn page. And again - that's necessary in this job market. Recruiters reach out to me all the time with positions in Herndon, Fairfax, McLean, and DC. They wouldn't contact me if they didn't know I live within an hour commute of their offices.

Fortunately, I have a fully remote work position, and I'm quite happy with it. Anytime a recruiter mentions in-office work, whether it's hybrid or 5 days a week (gross), I mentally increment the salary requirements significantly. And trust me, I openly acknowledge to friends and family me how lucky I am to be in the position to both ask for more, and to turn down shitty offers.

3. Use a fake birthday

I used to use a fake birthday on all social media and all accounts across the web. Not faking the year; just putting the first of the month, instead of the actual day (you have 27 to 30 guesses to figure out the right day). But with more and more services adding identification verification, I'm worried I'll be locked out of accounts because of a mismatch of data. I haven't had to scan my ID for anything except government sites like the DMV, so I'm not too worried yet. Still, it's a frustrating worry to have.

All the ID verification is due to advocacy groups claiming to "protect kids" online. If you really wanted to protect kids online, you wouldn't make them enter their own or their parent's IDs into a random 3rd party service just to watch a dang YouTube video. All this fearmongering about children online is just a smokescreen for collecting our information. I'm far from the first to have made this comment, but it bears repeating in as many places online as possible.

Conclusion

I don't know if there is a good conclusion to this post. These are the ramblings of a software engineer who's just tired of the modern web. I've written tens of thousands of lines of code for dynamic, React-driven, modular, route-based-whatever style webpages; my personal site, here, is 100% static and served as raw HTML and CSS. If you right-click on this page and click "View Page Source", you can literally see this text is written in a paragraph tag, <p>.

I think my broader point, something I've been noticing over the past few years, is that our Internet privacy has slipped away, mostly unnoticed. And I don't know how we get it back.