Note: This FAQ is incomplete. I have made it available because it now contains considerably more than the original FAQ, but there is still much work to be done. Please send suggestions, comments, and contributions to Diane Wilson.

If you're reading this page, chances are that you are concerned about privacy regarding your interest in transgender information. Whether it's about you, or your spouse, or anyone else, isn't an issue.

3.1 How Do I Protect My Privacy Online?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has the best resources on privacy that I've found on the Internet. I encourage anyone who is concerned to visit this site and read as much as possible.

The short version is this: The time to do something about maintaining your privacy is right now. Email is only somewhat private, because you are at the mercy of any person that you send email to. Some people will respect that; others may not. But as far as posting in newsgroups, or having a web site, there's no such thing as being "a little bit out." Either you are, or you aren't. If you are out, anyone can find you with one of the many search engines on the net.

An important way to protect yourself is by use of an anonymous remailer. There are several such services on the net; their basic service is to resend email and newsgroup posts after stripping out all identifying information. EFF provides a list of several remailers.

Are there any in-between states between being completely anonymous and completely findable? I wish I could offer some reassurance, but I can't.

For newsgroups, remember that at least two major search engines, DejaNews and Alta Vista, try to archive everything that gets posted. You can request that DejaNews remove your posts (specific posts, not "all" posts), but to the best of my knowledge Alta Vista will not do this. Also remember that there are other archives, some more selective than others. Some newsgroups keep their own archives; even if you don't know that you're posting in one of those, replying to a cross-posted article might get you there. Also, some individuals archive some or all of the activity in newsgroups they are interested in.

Some major newsgroup archivers will honor requests not to archive specific articles. To do this, you must include the line

x-no-archive: yes

in either the headers for your post, or as the first line in the body of a post. The x-no-archive line must read exactly as it's typed above. The problem with this is that anyone can respond to your article and quote part or all of it, and that will get archived unless that person notices your x-no-archive request, decides to honor the intent of your request, adds the x-no-archive request to his own post, and adds it correctly. This is not a mechanism to rely on.

Maintaining a web site and being absolutely anonymous is not necessarily easy. While you can get free web space from servers such as <http://www.geocities.com/>, you will need to investigate their arrangements for maintaining confidentiality. But the really hard part of being anonymous with a web site is that if you want people to visit your site, you have to tell them where it is. That means posting and emailing, but only including that web site information in anonymous posts and email. Be aware that twwells normally tries to strip signatures from anonymous email and posts; you can either try to fool the server or tell it to leave your signature in place (or put your web address somewhere other than in your signature). You can also ask other sites to link to yours, but making such requests either relies on their honoring your confidentiality, or your having a way to send email anonymously--in twwells, you have to know the other person's anon-id. Any way you look at it, the question of advertising your web presence while remaining anonymous is a sticky one.

Unlinked web pages are certainly not safe; they can still be registered under search engines. There are ways to ask the search engines not to index a page, but again you must trust that all indexers will honor this. I'd advise against being this trusting. Also, every directory on your web site needs to have a "index.html" file (or whatever the default file is for your server); otherwise, people will have a hole that will let them browse your directories. (There are also "scripts" that can allow this, but they have to be installed on your server. Check with your server's tech support to see whether this is the case.)

Browsing the web is somewhat safer. However, some web designers would like very much to be able to obtain your account information so they can mail you. They can't do this reliably yet, meaning that they can't get this from everyone that visits their site. What matters to you is whether they can get this information from you.

I strongly suggest that you turn off browser support for all of the following features that your browser supports:

• Java
• JavaScript or JScript
• ActiveX
• Visual Basic
• Cookies

Browser developers will try to tell you that at least some of these are secure, but security holes may still be found. The real question is how much do you want to rely on their optimism?

3.2 How Do I Protect My Privacy In Real Life?

This is a much more difficult topic than online privacy. Unless you live alone and share your life with no one, you risk being found out, sooner or later. If you do live alone and share your life with no one, you are putting yourself at serious risk for depression.

It's hard to separate this issue from others, including coming out, employment, and activism.

3.3 To What Extent is Privacy Important?

Only you can decide for you. Having secrets means having to protect those secrets. Not having secrets means worrying less about having things to protect.

However, you need to assess your own privacy needs in terms of your own life. This is a set of issues that many of us need to re-evaluate from time to time.

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Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk. Things change daily on the Net and net-related information in this FAQ may not necessarily be correct. The only part of this document that can be considered perpetually accurate is the charter quoted in the first section of the Introduction.

Copyright © 1994-1997 by Amy A. Lewis, Kymberleigh Richards, and Diane Wilson. This page may be redistributed only after notifying the authors and entirely without changes other than what may be required for formatting into another medium.

Last updated May 27, 2001.

The soc.support.transgendered FAQ was originally written by Amy A. Lewis <alicorn@pobox.com>, and was updated in late 1995 and early 1996 by Kymberleigh Richards <sysadmin@xconn.com>. It is currently maintained by Diane Wilson <diane@firelily.com>; updates and additions should be sent to Diane Wilson. The FAQ Introduction is also available via the Cross Connection archive server.