Most people are proud of their open source contributions; they&#x27;re part of your personal brand, and people in the community like to look good&#x2F;get discovered that way. It builds credibility and shows goodwill.<p>I use pseudonyms when I wish to speak freely to a larger internet-only community, away from scrutiny by people who know me in real life but may not understand the context of the community in which a discussion takes place. I suppose I would construct an alter ego on Github if I were working on something illegal in my country.<p>Anything targeted at people who know you should be under the name they know you by. It&#x27;s not as if pseudonymity defeats Big Data - all they care about is which ads you&#x27;re likely to click on, whether there is a correct name associated with that profile is of no consequence. And of course anything not done through Tor can still be traced through your ISP&#x27;s subscriber records. Using a pseudonym on, say, Facebook mostly just inconveniences people.  I suppose it could be a reasonable countermeasure against a stalker, but locked-down privacy settings (or just not using Facebook) are probably safer bets.