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Before composition an article most a dating Web site, I’d subscribed up for it in visit to Negro its service. Once I was finished composition most it, I mitt my strikingness up. (Newly single, I figured it couldn’t perceive to wager what category of fervour strength invoke up.)

Then, a slightly alarming state sailed into my in-box.

“Funny how digit removed online identities crapper so easily encounter by happenstance,” it read.

My digital lover said he’d constituted me from a assorted site, Foursquare, the ambulatory ethnic meshwork that lets users programme their whereabouts to friends. It awards realistic mayorships to the most regular patrons of exerciser and restaurants; I’d claimed the honor at a sushi restaurant. When my lover patterned into the render with Foursquare, a asking declaring my position as politician popped up, along with my picture and name.

Being contacted by a intruder didn’t signal me; that’s conception of the warning of sites aforementioned Twitter and Facebook, which crapper support appearance newborn relationships around ordinary interests and friends. But the unheralded constituent of romance threw me for a loop. I wasn’t trusty how to proceed. Should I foregather the Negro for a drink? I polled my friends.

“NO!” came digit shrieking salutation via text; added someone shrugged, wondering ground I was harassed most existence unmasked. After all, I springy online with whatever qualms. Facebook and Twitter, nonnegative Foursquare, Tumblr and Instagram, are meet the counsel of the iceberg. Still, I wasn’t expecting fragments of my online appearance to strike in such a rough way. I’d mitt discover specifics most myself, prototypal to notice that dating place undetected, then to reinvent myself as an suitable bachelorette.

In the end, I didn’t go on the date. I desired to inform myself to a beautiful intruder at my possess pace, kinda than be unclothed in digit lapse swoop. I couldn’t agree the science disequilibrium in noesis and aggregation that came with the note: He knew so such most me, and I knew null most him.

But the undergo upraised a discourse I haven’t been healthy to shake. As digital identities embellish progressively continual crossways the Web, is it ease doable to reinvent oneself online?

“We are every feat finished the uneasy undergo of discovering meet how such aggregation most ourselves that we place discover there,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a scientist at the Berkman Center for cyberspace and Society at Harvard, who studies online countenance and the digital world. “As we casually go most our business, we are unseaworthy every kinds of accumulation that someone crapper warning backwards together.”

Such discomforting clashes between the lives we advance online and those we advance absent from the keyboard are probable to acquire in frequency. But there could be large issues here than wanting to ready a dating strikingness discreet, Mr. Zuckerman said, aforementioned struggling to protect the indistinguishability of a semipolitical whistle-blower or a individualist of abuse. Retaining obscurity becomes more hornlike as the Web grouping becomes more interconnected.

“Staying low the radiolocation is rattling hornlike to do patch using the flooded features of the Web,” he said. The challenge, he said, is to wager how profession crapper line users into distribution more than they strength otherwise.

Companies that do playing online progressively accommodate their sites to individualist users. Netflix, Amazon and Pandora every state your preferences to attain their services more useful. The aforementioned goes for Facebook and Google, which foreshorten clicking and feeding activity to make course and aggregation you see, supported on the aggregation you share.

“The forthcoming of the Web is to personalize,” said Amit Kapur, the honcho chief of Gravity, a start-up in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s dynamical a family agitate that module modify the Web from theirs to ours to yours.”

Gravity, a agency that “mines your interests from Facebook and Twitter to inform things from around the Web to you,” is tweaking its software, he said, with the intend of performing functions aforementioned delivering reinforced edifice recommendations and powering personalized programme readers. Such services support companies make business for Web consumers.

That haw be dustlike for businesses, but what do we retrograde when we can’t mutate and slough finished online personas? There’s something scrumptiously freeing most sloughing one’s consciousness to dress a shiny newborn identity. It’s ground vast multiuser online games aforementioned World of Warcraft hit flourished and ground the nameless video-chatting place Chatroulette catapulted in popularity.

The most ordinary housing against obscurity is that it gives uprise to intense activity online, allowing a sheeplike Web denizen to artefact from a Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde. And patch this is a actual problem, whatever advocates of Web anonymity, aforementioned Christopher Poole, the originator of an online accord titled 4chan, feature grouping should be healthy to removed their online and offline identities.

“There is ever a need,” he said, “to be healthy to move into a conversation and hit your effort judged for its worthiness and not who you are.”

Mr. Poole and whatever another entrepreneurs are disagreeable to physique whatever layers of obscurity backwards into the Web. He says he’s doing that with a newborn company, Canvas Networks, that module research with an online accord that module earmark whatever indistinguishability concealment. Others are creating tools and art discover areas on the Web to preserves discretion. For example, a agency titled Disconnect disables third-party chase patch Web surfing. And a wager engine titled DuckDuckGo does not amass feeding story or some individualized classifiable information, its creators say.

B. J. Fogg, a linguist at Stanford, suggests that in the future, grouping module not advise most the Web unobserved or switch identities as easily as a day costume.

“People are not feat to go backwards from disclosing everything and experience discover their lives online,” he said, adding that an evolutionary agitate toward greater online openness is low way.

“The djinny is discover of the bottle,” he said.

Maybe Mr. Fogg is right, and the demands of a digital style hit ordered a large social transformation into motion. But there is something of a furtive status afoot, the fringes of which I crapper wager on the Facebook tender of my 13-year-old niece. She and her friends ingest exclusive artful concealment obloquy to refer themselves, and the exclusive strikingness pictures they place are rendered nearly unidentifiable by humor whist and sparkles. Maybe it’s a start.