The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity (Updated to v0.9.8)

Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer/writer of the guide and I would appreciate any opinion, suggestion, criticism (even harsh criticism) from the HN community. Feel free to point out any inaccuracies or errors if you spot any. It would be more than welcome. Obviously, I don't want to spread misinformation or inaccuracies. I also know my guide was posted before by someone else but unfortunately not by me and I completely missed that post. It was significantly updated since then.

As a submission to HN, most of the homepage wasn't useful to read. You should change the link to https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html#table-of-contents and link straight to the contents.

How about a section on physical destruction? I am often stuck in neverending debated about how to properly destroy plaintext data on physical media. Does cracking a platter suffice? Do I have to grind up every little chip in an SSD? What parts of a laptop have serial numbers that might be used to track down it's owner?

Nice guide, this is like a platonic ideal of anonymity we'd like to have but never will.

Years of using FB when I was younger, general lapses in judgement or overlooks in privacy when in tense or pressing situations, compromises I've made in using services with certain people or jobs, many regretful apps or purchases and sign ups, years of my email and phone number shared to 3rd parties, I could go on...

And that's just the data I've shared knowingly, mostly due to the social contract when functioning in certain groups. The odds are stacked up against an individual.

The reason I mentioned that it's a platonic ideal is because it takes a lot of education and experience for one to even _know_ how to be anonymous—we're not born a priori with an understanding of privacy wrt technology, and we don't learn about tech privacy early say compared to privacy in the physical world. Maybe older folk that were wise to all of these violations as they became prevalent, but younger people are already profiled and marketed to before they understand any of these concepts—it's so dire. I think an approach that may work is for the blocking and scrubbing to be on the hardware and software vendors level with privacy-options baked in and set as default. A given, sort of like how you expect a bathroom stall to be private.

Another solution, assuming we can't escape being tracked, would be to weaponise our data with tools like trackmenot[0] and adnauseam[1].

1. https://trackmenot.io

2. https://adnauseam.io

This has been on my to-do list for a while!