How We Leave Digital Breadcrumbs Without Knowing It

The other night, my daughter was signing up for a new site. She turned to me and asked, “Is it okay if I just use this one?”
It was the default username the site had suggested which consisted of her first name followed by some random numbers.

Looked harmless. But it got us talking.

I asked if she’d thought about not using her name at all.

She gave me a look. “Why not?”

It’s a fair question. Most of us grew up online using our names without thinking twice. But I’ve spent enough time digging into OSINT (open-source intelligence) to know just how far those little breadcrumbs can travel. In work I did with Tracelabs, I saw firsthand how someone’s old forum handle or a reused gamer tag could unravel a whole trail of social media accounts, email addresses, and personal history.

• A reused handle on a random forum.
• A gamer tag from years ago.
• Same name, same pattern.

Suddenly you’ve got a breadcrumb trail that links accounts across totally different sites. Even stuff people thought was anonymous. It doesn’t take much.

We’ve done a good job teaching people not to reuse passwords.
But we rarely talk about usernames the same way.

And yet, they’re usually public, searchable, and often permanent. Combine that with a unique handle—especially one with personal information or an identifiable pattern—and you’ve just built a trackable fingerprint across the web.

A username is often more visible than your password ever will be.

Funny thing—my daughter pointed out that one of her friends always uses the same four numbers in her username.
“Think it’s her PIN?”

Maybe. Could be a birthday. Could be nothing. But it’s a good prompt to think differently.

These days I treat usernames more like passwords. If I’m signing up somewhere and I don’t need people to know it’s me, I’ll just generate one. Click through a username generator till something decent comes up. Or let the password manager do it.

It doesn’t matter if it sounds like me. Most of the time, the name you pick doesn’t affect how the site works at all.

Of course, people push back.

“What if my friends want to find me?”

Simple. Send them the link.

Also, lots of platforms let people search by display name or phone number anyway (which, side note, you probably don’t want public either).
There’s no real reason to make yourself searchable to everyone just to be reachable by a few.

And you don’t have to start from scratch. Go back and look at your existing accounts. I realised not long ago that an old account still had my last name in the handle. Just sitting there.

Easy fix. I changed it.

This isn’t about hiding who you are.
It’s about choosing who gets to see what.

And that’s a habit I’m glad we talked about.