How can someone go off-web and anonymize themselves after a life online?

You are oversimplifying. The thing is that it's good to be part of a community. Feels good to use your real name and it's only natural.

Facebook is an awesome service to find old friends, find new friends with the same interests, exchange visual info (sharing your baby's picture with your family) etc.

Being able to sync devices across is awesome. But try that outside Google/Apple and you're against a wall. Of course it can be done, but not for all applications etc.

Thing is that today's technology offers one hell of an options compared to ten years ago. But more than half of those comes with sharing your real data. Not just out of cunning CEO's or the NSA but out of pure functionality: If you don't use your real name in Twitter/Facebook how are other people suppose to find you?

Try keeping contact with friends via email. It's impossible, especially for the tech-unsavvy, while with facebook everything comes easy.

I would like to erase some of my online past, but it's not important. Not that much. What matters to me is:

* Remove all LEGAL powers for someone to harvest, sell, explore your data without me explicitly knowing about it.

* Prevent and heavily punish data abuse.

* Know the system[1]

[1] If you know how a system works (the internet, surveillance, etc) you can circumvent it, anytime. Tor will not help you if you use it to login into facebook. I mean, your enemy will know instantly that you're using TOR, your exit node etc. Being anonymous online, even without someone tailing you it's very hard but it can be done.

The problem with true online anonymity, is that it's not a one-time thing. It's a policy that needs you to be strict. No more forums, new fake emails all the time, registrations, etc. All of us can do that, but are we willing to do so??? I'm not.

We can't turn the clock back in time and undo what we did (except maybe if we are able to travel at light-speed... but that's not the point I guess). We have to focus on how to make governments and companies much more accountable about what they are doing. Many laws need extra elasticity (copyright) while others need to get much tougher (abuse of power by any authority).

Also some advancements at protocol level like user-predefine packet (path) routing, DNS and internet decentralization (away from USA), would not be a bad start.

The problem is the ease at which the various identities can be identified as belong to the same person.

Very few people have the kind of processes that really protect that online personas from being uncovered.

It's non-trivial to ensure that you always associate cookies , IP addresses, browser signatures, behaviour... with one persona and yet never ever leak that to another.

Bear in mind that computers are so precise in their work here that you only need screw up once to burn that persona forever.

Pseudonymity is achievable, but unless you say nothing and participate in nothing anonymity is incredibly hard to achieve for a single persona.

Anonymity is exponentially harder to achieve when you have multiple personas.

And this is before you get into face recognition of photos, language analysis, gait analysis etc all attempting to to the real you from the very things that are harder to fake.

Strange. I was considered paranoid up to the point when it became clear that I was right all the time. Now I have a kind of "let it go" feeling where I think: your main computer, name, location, interests and so on are probably gone already as well as those of my close relatives. So why bother? I now really think about getting an Facebook and some online shopping accounts...scary ;)

I have an separated and heavy encrypted off-line network for the stuff I really want to keep secret. That won't change ever because seperating data became a part of my life and I can live with that pretty good.

stop using the internet.

then get a fake identity in the same ways that have been possible for hundreds of years now...

that big trail of data on the internet is useless if it points nowhere.

what i never understand is why anyone wants to do this unless they want to do something wrong and get away with it. i also think we all collectively need to get over privacy - if its not about being caught out doing wrong things then all you get is embarassment potentially? i'm not sure i really understand...

i had to fill out a voter registration form recently, its a legal requirement and there was a big part of me that wanted to not do it on principle. however, weighing up the advantages of being a legal member of society over not quickly changed my mind...