Blogger is exposing anonymous bloggers

If you signed up for email notification, which almost every blogger does, due to convenience, this might concern you. Email notification is the service that allows you to receive comments dropped on your blog posts, in your email, so you don’t have to go to your blog to see new comments. Makes real sense, right?
Well, about a month ago, I realised that whenever I replied to someone’s comment on my blog, rather that deliver to my email, as an email notification, it would send a message saying the message couldn’t be delivered to the blogger, i.e. me, and add the blogger’s email address it was supposed to deliver to. But I never had issues when people dropped comments on my blog, I still received their comments in my email. I want to believe they were receiving the failure notification, since they were the ones dropping the comments, even though I was receiving their comments. And here is why.

Last week, I started receiving these failure notifications when I dropped comments on the posts of some bloggers. Not a big deal, right? Since they were seeing my comments. Well, not really! Remember the notification will tell you the exact email address it failed to deliver to. This means if you had used your personal email account to receive notifications, I can see your email address.

So there’s this anonymous blogger whose blog I dropped a comment on, and I saw her real name included in the email notification failure. The good thing is, she is actually my friend in real life, as many bloggers have come to be, so I know her real name, but what of other bloggers that did not know her?

Let us take Cherrywine for example. Her real name is Chika Eze, she has real life friends on blogger, who are also anonymous, but they don’t know her particular blog, and she doesn’t know theirs. They drop a comment on her blog, and suddenly they receive a notification that their comment couldn’t be delivered to chikaeze@yahoo.com. Then they go “wow, so Chika is cherrywine.” All your years of anonymity gone, just like that, poof! And if you are a scandalous blogger who likes forming holy in real life, you will gaaaannn explain to your pastor why you like sleeping with married men for money.

So where am I going with this? If you are an anonymous blogger, you are not so anonymous at the moment. The solution is to either sign off the email notification service, or change the email with which you receive comments to something completely vague like youshouldmindyourbusiness@yahoo.com, but you will have to create such a vague email address sha. That way, no one will know your real name, when they get the failure notification.

As for me, I have nothing to worry about since I am not anonymous. I just did my own bit, since most of you already see me as the blogger police, lol. I gotta protect the lives and properties of my fellow blogsville community members.