Depends. Does that include making questionable Google searches about hundreds of different crime plots so that government handlers get super confused later on down the line?
Gotta make at least one-bank-heist-search a month.
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#22Of course. This was the encouraged behavior in the early 2k. There were little PSA's about it online. You never put your real info online, because there are crazy people out there that will use it. I've tried to explain to friends and family that they shouldn't put their first, middle, and last name, all employment info, city, state, etc in their social media bio, and use the same headshot in all their accounts, but…
Crazy people, like Amazon, and Google, and the RNC and DNC think tanks. To maximize the extraction of value from your life, of course. Enjoy the ride.
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#23This article reminded me of seeing this in GH trending repositories last month: https://github.com/soxoj/maigret
"For educational and lawful purposes only"
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#24I had the good sense to use a fake name long ago when I first signed up for facebook. A handful of my friends did the same. Over the years it has paid off in terms of people I don't know not being able to look me up. I'm also lucky to have a very common name. I am very un-googlable unless you know actual details about my professional life, in which case you can learn a bit more about what I do for work, but nothing e…
All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style. I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else i…
The worst of both worlds is that you share a less common name with someone notorious for some reason, perhaps in the same city. Happened to someone I knew in grad school and they got literal death threats on their phone, number of which was in the phone book.
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#25Derek Sivers is of the opinion that a fake persona is better than not sharing any details [1]: > Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions. 1: https://sive.rs/anon
Noisy signals about tech literate people is still a signal. If only few experts are planting fake data about themselves, companies can cordon you off and spend more resources in deanonymizing you. By muddying the water, you are planting a target on yourself if many others aren't doing it.
Depends on the details IMO.
I always have my birthday, age, etc slightly off if possible for instance. I don’t claim to be 130 or something ridiculous. It’s all believable, near-accurate but not too near stuff for me.
Even comments on forums. I lie (in ways that don’t matter/deceive the people being talked to). I lie about my age, my family makeup, etc. when the info is relevant but doesn’t need to be specific. Example: if I’m 40, I’ll say I’m 43 (or in my mid-40’s or some other general statement) if being in that age range is what matters. If being 40 is what matters, well…I likely don’t need to comment badly enough to give that away.
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#26I had the good sense to use a fake name long ago when I first signed up for facebook. A handful of my friends did the same. Over the years it has paid off in terms of people I don't know not being able to look me up. I'm also lucky to have a very common name. I am very un-googlable unless you know actual details about my professional life, in which case you can learn a bit more about what I do for work, but nothing e…
All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style. I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else i…
>All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style.
I don't think this is true for most people. Unless you are a relatively prolific (probably top 1% or even 0.1% or less), you likely do not have enough long form writing online to create a unique style fingerprint. All of your accounts will be consistent with having been written by the same person, but absent other information, will not be enough on their own to say that they were written by one and only one person.
And even for people who do have enough writing online to create a truly unique fingerprint, that fingerprint will not be universally applicable to all their accounts (at least not solely by writing style*). Even when you have a truly unique profile for someones writing style, a given writing sample needs to be greater than some minimum length in order to consistently match it.
Linking literally all of your online accounts will probably use writing style as a factor, but I very much doubt it will ever be enough on it's own.
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#27This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the social graph, through photos, through interests, etc.
Your best defense is to use stable identities only for the things where keeping a historical record of your interactions is important to you. So sure, your GitHub portfolio (in the pre-LLM era, I guess), your research papers, maybe LinkedIn. But political flame wars on Reddit? Change accounts and delete comments aggressively, the only value of keeping it around is helping the bad guys.
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#28Derek Sivers is of the opinion that a fake persona is better than not sharing any details [1]: > Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions. 1: https://sive.rs/anon
Noisy signals about tech literate people is still a signal. If only few experts are planting fake data about themselves, companies can cordon you off and spend more resources in deanonymizing you. By muddying the water, you are planting a target on yourself if many others aren't doing it.
Actually, noise is the opposite of signal. Data harvesting companies hate noise because strong signals are profitable. It's why Google successfully pushed for people to use their real identities online initially through Google Plus and why they also displayed such an unprecedented backlash against the AdNauseum browser extension after it came out
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#29This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the…
I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop.
I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.
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#30This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the…
I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop. I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.
No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.