Rotating between the three on purpose

The practice, stated plainly

Every so often, paste a different one of the three than the one you used last. Not because anything is wrong with the one you were using, and not on a schedule. Just occasionally, arbitrarily, the way you picked in the first place.

That is the whole practice. It takes no longer than the normal path, because pasting one string costs the same as pasting another.

What it maintains

• Your store stays honest. If one of the three has gone missing from your notes or been mangled, you find out on an ordinary day rather than a bad one.
• The other two stay in reach rather than in the background, which is the failure described in habit picking for you.
• Switching stops being an unfamiliar act. The first time you use a different address should not be the time you are already annoyed.
• You accumulate a rough sense of whether the three behave similarly for you, which is worth something when you later have to read a difference.

What it does not do

It does not make you harder to observe, it does not spread anything out, and it does not protect anything. Those are the two expectations people bring to the word rotation, both imported from other contexts, and neither survives contact with what is actually happening.

Rotating between three routes to one service is not a security measure. It is housekeeping.

The cost, which is small but not zero

Using a different address means a new session on that route. You will be signed out and any front door check will be presented again, because those things belong to the route rather than to you. The session is not shared study covers exactly what is dropped.

That is the whole cost. It is why rotating is a thing to do at the start of a visit rather than in the middle of one, where it is a genuine interruption. See the cost of switching.

Not a schedule

A rule like every third visit turns this into a chore and gets abandoned. It also produces a false sense that the practice is doing more work than it is.

Arbitrary is enough. If you cannot remember which you used last, that is a sign the rotation is working rather than a problem to fix.

Why this belongs in choosing rather than switching

Rotation is a decision made before a visit starts, when nothing is at stake and nothing is half finished. Switching, in the sense the switching section uses it, is something done mid visit with work in progress, and it has costs that rotation does not.

They are often confused, and the confusion makes rotation sound more disruptive than it is.

The honest size of the benefit

Small and real. It is a cheap way of keeping a set from decaying into a favourite, and the decay is otherwise silent. Nobody notices a set going stale while everything works, which is the only time you could have fixed it easily.

How to tell whether the practice is doing anything

One question: if you had to produce the two addresses you do not normally use, right now, as text, could you. A reader who rotates occasionally can always answer yes, because they did it recently.

A reader who does not rotate will usually discover that the answer is no, and will discover it here rather than at a bad moment. That is the whole of the benefit and it is worth more than the argument for it suggests, because the discovery is otherwise made under pressure.

What this study is not. It is not a security practice, and nothing here suggests that varying which address you open changes what anyone can observe about you.