

Want your privacy back? Try disappearing - rlm
http://lastwatchdog.com/privacy-back-disappearing/

======
leviathant
Earlier this year, a friend of mine (Alex) was part of the Wired "Disappear"
contest that was tied in with the Repomen movie. She had to disappear for a
month, all while doing one or two mandated tasks from Loneshark Games to give
some clues to the people hunting her and three other "runners" down. With all
the photos and videos the runners had taken during the course of the hunt, it
would have made for a really fascinating read, but the writer left before the
feature was finished, and the whole thing was boiled down to a rather lame
blog post instead.

<http://cs.condenastdigital.com/cs/wordpress/repomen/?p=2124>

I've bugged her to write down her experience in some form, she traveled all
over the country on a limited budget, and we pulled some pretty smooth tricks
on the people chasing her (by the time one guy figured out I was a mole, none
of the other hunters trusted him, and thought HE was the one leaking info to
the runners), but she never got around to that.

Alex managed to elude people quite well, using me and one other friend as her
sole contacts during the ordeal. I think we did a smashing job eluding
everyone, and it was a really fascinating experience, even just from my
position as the guy gathering and relaying intelligence and information. The
other guy who beat the hunters was ex-Army, said we'd do well in the CIA, heh.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm really posting about is that even when you're forced
to reveal aspects of your whereabouts online, it's not that hard to disappear.
The hard part is not going crazy during the process. At first you're too
paranoid, but if you get too comfortable, you'll start to give away clues to
your past, and that will ultimately be your undoing. "Never look back" is so
much harder than most people realize, especially in the long term.

I would love to believe that in the future, people are given more leeway for
the way they behaved in their youth, given the way the internet never forgets.
Everyone makes mistakes, but so many people are documenting each other now,
things like that aren't forgotten the way they used to be.

The idea of completely shedding an old identity is pretty absurd, a short-term
workaround at best.

------
getonit
I wish there was more explanation for the "never use a false identity" bullet
point. Your real identity is out, surely? Does this mean avoid having to use
an identity at all? What if you're forced? (pulled over, etc.)

