21–30 of 260 posts
"Ultimately, anonymity comes down to one thing: Control. You should educate yourself on data privacy and make sure that you know what data you're sharing and what is possibly out there." That's some REALLY good Solid advice.
> Don't use macOS or Windows -- only Linux > Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest Juvenile, snarky, irreverent and irrelevant advice I'd expect to read on a 12 year old's Reddit post.
> I don't know about you, but I don't want to do all of that. [...] I don't recommend being on either extreme of this spectrum. It's a list of extreme techniques for protecting ones' identity online. Of course, completely sanitizing your online presence is difficult, and probably unnecessary. I thought the two lists were a nice rhetorical framing - present a dilemma (total openness vs. total anonymity) and then wiggl…
The items I quoted do nothing to protect ones' identity online. Snark is only effective if relevant.
This gave me a radical company idea, on the other end of the spectrum: spam as a service. Something that'll take your name, email, and other things and put it all over the internet in questionable and plausibly denial ways. That way, even when someone is trying to find things out about you, it'll be hard to find, and easy to deny. (I'm kidding of course).
> Don't use macOS or Windows -- only Linux > Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest Juvenile, snarky, irreverent and irrelevant advice I'd expect to read on a 12 year old's Reddit post.
>I don't know about you, but I don't want to do all of that.
As an experiment, a few years ago I put my mobile phone number on my blog, and to date I've only received 2 anonmous messages on Signal but no calls besides recruiters.
The old adage "No one is thinking about you as much as they are thinking about themselves" is true.
While it's good to practice good security hygiene, be mindful of also being practical.
However, over time I drop enough clues that people could figure my real identity with a little work. That leaves me with the worst of both worlds. It seems safest to assume that your identity is always tied to everything you do online.
I make sure that I can be found and attributed. I deleted my last anonymous account, a couple of years ago. In the Days of Yore, I was pretty much "Dick From the Internet." A real neckbeard troll.
There's a lot of reasons that I do it. The biggest, is that I want to be in control of my narrative. I learned from a couple of folks that are really good at curating their SEO results.
Also, these days (for a change), I'm pretty well-behaved. Doing it this way, helps to keep it that way.
I would strongly advise anyone who really wants to be anonymous on the internet such as a freedom activist in a totalitarian country, not to follow the advice listed at the end of the article. Or rather: these are very basic and very naive recommendations, certainly good first steps, but absolutely nowhere near enough to guarantee strong anonymity on the internet. Remaining truly anonymous on the net is extremely har…
Would the solution be a digital version of the old newspaper cutout ransom letter? Generate via GPT-3 a text giving roughly the impression you want to make and then copy/paste sentences from online news media if you need the names of particular persons or events. Would be rather crude though, but less tedious than literally cutting and pasting letters was.
> Don't use macOS or Windows -- only Linux > Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest Juvenile, snarky, irreverent and irrelevant advice I'd expect to read on a 12 year old's Reddit post.