>> Did you google and not find anything? huh? Stefan, is that really your
>> real name? Now you're a suspect. No wait... yes, I've googled you and
>> found some hits. Now you're no longer a suspect. :)
>
>Hehe! Stefan Otto is not exactly a common name in Germany (about 100 in the national phone book) but there are still a couple of them around. I just googled and found the first valid reference on page 10, which was a listing of Linux users in my state (Sachsen-Anhalt) on the Linux Counter website. Googling Usenet brought a lot of hits, though.
>
>JFTR, I fully agree with what you said about business mail.

I've just googled newsgroups and found surprisingly many (120) hits on my own name. One item from years ago came in handy, so it's also a nice archive for myself. :)
I've also done a check on whether I've said compromising things in those threads. Luckily there were no such items. But some of those threads do indeed reveal some of my personal opinions. A reader might thus get an 'interesting' impression on who I am and what my stance in matters is.

I think everyone should do such googling on the own name at least once. It will make them aware of the privacy aspect.

Some days ago I attended an MSN chat of my children. Those kids have chats with several other kids at the same time. They type texts like "ok yeaaah, rrrrright!!!" and "mwaaaah... thats NOT TRUE.. hes a yertk", including many grammatical errors. I'm sure they miscommunicate a LOT, but they keep telling me that it's the standard way to chat. Anyway, what I wanted to say is... I hope these chats are not archived by Google. :)