best-practice: username that does not reveal information about the user

Question

PROBLEM:

Build a web-application that allows a human-being to create a new username, but where the username does not reveal any personal information about that individual. Moreover, the username should be easy for the individual to remember whenever they visit the website.

QUESTION:

What is the best approach for creating a name that identifies the individual, but does not reveal any "real-world" personal information about who the individual is, but is nonetheless easy for the real-world person to memorize and use on a regular basis?

Answer 1

...let the user choose one arbitrarily?

Answer 2

There is no easily remembered username that will not reveal any personal information. There is also no way of automatically generating a username that will be both a) unique and b) memorable to all. If that is a requirement, have the user type one in themselves.

Answer 3

Make the login info separate from the display name.

For example, on StackOverflow, I log in with an email address, but my name is displayed as whatever I want it to be. This way, it's easy for me to remember my login info, but no one knows anything about me unless I want them to.

Answer 4

One option would be to seperate the login username and the display username - that is, user John Doe would enter 'jdoe' on their login form, but other users would see him as 'user284823' or something equally random (you can look into using Markov chains or something to generate pronouncable display names as well).