What if the key to anonymity is putting more information out there rather than less?
Say you're a 26-year-old who just got hired as a middle school teacher. You love your new job. Your students are great. But what if they Google you and make it to the third page of results, where there's a link to a sexually explicit column you wrote years ago for a now defunct Web magazine? Awkward. Maybe even a threat to your career. Alas, the erstwhile editor of the site won't remove the piece. And even if he did it would live on -- it's hard to remove anything from the Internet.
In the future, I wonder if it'll be common for people in situations like that to stop trying to scrub information from the Web, preferring to strategically add more content to the cloud as an elaborate diversion. Our hypothetical teacher, Aundrea McFarnsworth, might figure her name is too uncommon for her secret to survive forever. So she creates an online presence for a couple other fake people with the exact same name; fabricates Facebook accounts for them; establishes a presence on Twitter; and launches a fake blog making clear that one of the other McFarnsworths is an aspiring sex columnist who once wrote for the defunct Web magazine. Were there ever an intensive investigation her ploy wouldn't hold up, but it would be enough for her purposes.