
How can someone go off-web and anonymize themselves after a life online? - antr
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-can-someone-go-off-web-and-anonymise-themselves-after-a-life-online
======
user24
I've become increasingly concerned with this topic. Looking back I feel
incredibly stupid.

When I was 16, I was 'paranoid' about computer security. I used gpg, would
never dream of giving my real name to any website. I distrusted every website.

Now I'm 31, and you can easily find 5 years of reddit comment history linked
to my almost unique real name. Facebook has algorithms that can link my face
to my real identity. I carry a location tracking device and microphone in my
pocket. I sit in front of a camera all day. Google has all my search history.
My ISP knows which sites I visit.

It's just incredible how comfortable I became with sharing this data about
myself online. I don't know how it happened. My 16 year old self imagined that
I'd have had some awesome technological setup that made me immune to tracking.
But the truth is I just got used to the possibility of being tracked, and then
forgot about it altogether.

But these NSA revelations have woken me up and I'm now back in that paranoid
state and actively seeking ways of protecting myself.

I think many people have had the same experience.

For all the talk about the generations of the future being tracked and
recorded from birth, I have to wonder if we're the dinosaurs and our kids will
be saying:

"Shit Dad, why did you share all this stuff about yourself, are you stupid or
something?"

~~~
atmosx
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.

~~~
user24
It's impossible not to over-simplify without writing a 10,000 word essay on
the topic.

I'm not advocating disappearing altogether. There's nothing wrong with keeping
in touch with my friends on facebook, sharing the odd picture.

I do disagree that it feels good to use my real name. I wish I'd been more
careful peppering my various accounts with references to my real name. I'd
really love to be able to press a button and have zero results come up on
google for my name.

Why on earth should you, random internet stranger, be a few clicks away from
finding photos of my baby son on facebook? Who gave you the authority to know
so much about me? Well, I did by sharing it in the first place.

Not that I have anything in particular to hide, but I feel very strongly that
it should be _me_ who's in control of that data.

I don't think it can be wholly solved by technology or by laws.

I think it can only be solved by behavioural changes in the way we use the
web.

~~~
bovermyer
In my opinion, user24, I like being publicly linked to everything I say or do
online. It means that the "me" that exists online is in perfect harmony with
the "me" that exists in the physical world. Anything I do online has
repercussions for my offline life, and vice versa. It makes me more connected
with the world.

~~~
user24
You don't fear that one day you might be denied entry to the UK for this
tweet?
[https://twitter.com/bovermyer/status/398163555742396416](https://twitter.com/bovermyer/status/398163555742396416)

~~~
bovermyer
Nope. I'm pretty content to speak my mind and let others figure out whether
what I'm saying chimes with their values or not.

~~~
user24
That's very brave of you, and I respect that, and only hope that you never
live to regret it.

I perhaps have slightly more fringe interests than you, and in the past have
been somewhat indiscreet, albeit on obscure forums.

~~~
bovermyer
I have to lie in the bed that I make, for better or worse, heh. I'm not trying
to sell a philosophy here, though - only state mine. You're perfectly welcome
to your own, and I'm not going to think any worse of you for it.

------
soneca
I've being trying to make this a HN hit for a long time now, and I will try
again as it is related to the topic.

The "name-your-price" web comic The Private Eye:
[http://panelsyndicate.com/](http://panelsyndicate.com/) is a great story on a
future world where online anonymity became impossible, then people went for
real world anonymity, all of us wearing masks and pseudonyms. It is really
interesting and entertaining to follow.

I have no connection of any kind with the authors, just a fan of their work.
And I really thought HN crowd would love it. But I submitted it a few times
and not a single upvote. Ever. Hope to find them some love now.

~~~
falcolas
I'm guessing it's because the only thing I see when I follow that link is the
long list of "buy now" buttons. No teaser for the comic, nothing to let me
gauge the comics worth... just a poorly designed webpage that only seems to
want to part me and my money.

I closed the website after about 3 seconds, and wouldn't even have commented
except for your seemingly genuine puzzlement at why someone wouldn't want to
read it.

~~~
evacuationdrill
You name your price, so just pay nothing for the first one, then if you like
it, buy the second.

~~~
smacktoward
It requires thought for the customer to realize they can do that, and thought
equals friction in a transaction, it costs you customers.

You could get the same effect without the friction just by offering the first
issue free and then putting the "Buy Now" buttons on the following issues.
That lets you put the word "FREE" next to one issue, which will indicate to
people that it's safe to click on if they're uncommitted. No thought on their
part required, which should translate to more downloads.

------
jka
Overheard in conversation at a security conference a few years ago: for many
people, it's probably likely that the fingerprint you leave just by the _top
ten websites you visit_ is quite distinguishing.

Given that - on top of all of the 'obvious' linkages that are out there
(friends, email contacts, identity cards/numbers, payment methods), it's
imaginable that for a 'suitably advanced' adversary, you have to be extremely
vigilant if you want to detach your new identity.

The reality for many people (including in modern witness protection, I'd
imagine) is that it simply isn't humanly feasible to be that perfect - so you
have to trust your benefactors to a certain extent (and assume that no-one
will get access to any correlation information they might build).

~~~
Theodores
I read that in the New York Times during the glory years of The War Against
Terror. So yes, our friends at the NSA are on to that one already. So you
could go to random cyber-cafes in a big city and still be stalked.

Obviously there is no evidence of _them_ having apprehended an al-qaeda terror
operative using this technique, mostly because there is no such thing as an
al-qaeda terror operative.

However, there is writing analysis too, 'I'd' imagine that they know you use
'I'd' and you might want to start using 'I would' from now on just to foil
their systems. Me, I am going to stop using the phrase 'The War Against
Terror'...

------
henrik_w
Reminds me of this video, from The Onion: "Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users
Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village"
[http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-
us...](http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-
protect-privacy,14358/)

------
DanielBMarkham
Of course the answer is: you can't.

You could ten years ago. You could give it a good shot now. But in another ten
years it's impossible.

We are living in the last age of anonymity.

We're also living in the last age of personalized history. When I tell a story
from my teenage years, in the 1980s, I get to tell the story any way I like.
After all, it's my memories. Each of us are able to own our version of
reality, which was very human and very comforting.

For kids going through their teenage years in the 2020s? Their entire life is
just a big dataset: where they went, who they talked to, what they said, how
their opinions evolved. Not only can they never leave their old life because
of hueristics and fingerprints, they can't even enjoy their own version of how
their life went. That's a major change in the nature of what it means to be
human.

------
davidw
I think it's best to create the public persona you want, and then just have a
bunch of stuff out there. People mostly won't sort through all of it.

This isn't me, by the way:
[http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts/david_welton.html](http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts/david_welton.html)
:-)

------
k-mcgrady
The biggest problem is probably going to be preventing other people from
putting you back on it (tagging you in photos, writing about you etc.).

I recently went through the Google listing for my name and found dozens of
profiles and sites I couldn't even remember signing up for. I was able to get
most closed successfully. One site I had particular issues with was
FriendFeed. I believe I signed up with my Twitter account, which I have since
deleted. In otherwords I can't sign in to shutdown the FriendFeed profile. It
also seems impossible to get in touch with them so that profile is stuck on
the web when I would rather it wasn't.

Once you remove yourself from the first few pages of Google (time consuming
but not difficult) your online life is invisible to most people. The only
people that will find anything are those that really dig.

P.S. If anyone knows how to get my profile removed from FriendFeed when I
can't login please let me know :)

------
phaemon
The interesting thing about the answers given there, is that they seem to
assume you can only have one identity at a time. Why not simply have multiple
identities?

Anonymising yourself then simply becomes a matter of picking a new name for
yourself and never telling anyone what it is and never doing anything under
that name. It's a pretty useless form of anonymity of course, but it does
suggest that anonymity itself isn't really particularly useful.

Perhaps anonymous _acts_ are what are really desired? The question of how to
act anonymously might provide different answers.

~~~
buro9
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.

------
Theodores
Here is how to do it:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation)

> Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is
> spread deliberately. It is an act of deception and false statements to
> convince someone of untruth. Disinformation should not be confused with
> misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.

> Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional
> support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the
> rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting
> false conclusions. A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and
> observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth
> while presenting it as the whole (a limited hangout).

> Another technique of concealing facts, or censorship, is also used if the
> group can affect such control. When channels of information cannot be
> completely closed, they can be rendered useless by filling them with
> disinformation, effectively lowering their signal-to-noise ratio and
> discrediting the opposition by association with many easily disproved false
> claims.

~~~
pacofvf
yes, that's the way I would do it, use pictures of people that looks like you,
start tagging yourself in such pics, also change your online behavior
gradually, create several online alter egos, and try to erase your old online
presence, after a while the online information about you should be worthless.

------
jokoon
I was scared while reading the best answer:

> Shops know what you buy in what amounts, because nobody buys all the same
> brands you are getting fingerprinted constantly. This is used for targeted
> advertising, but it can also theoretically be used to track you.

I live in france and I wonder if this is even legal here.

Even if you change you name, if you start buying some sort of the same
combination of grocery article, it can lead back to you if they do some
statistics on every people shopping on the globe. Even if you use cash, they
can still know that someone bought the same combination of articles somewhere.

Not using a smartphone will reduce how you're located. A classic GSM phone can
still be located being around a cellphone tower (and more precisely by using
triangulation, but it's painful), but smartphones have a tendencies of
communicating your GPS coordinates, which allows to track everyone's location
at the same time. The amount of hardware required to store all that
information must be quite astronomical, but still, a latitude and longitude
will be precise and just take 16 bytes at most, which is ridiculous.

------
dwaltrip
This is quite an interesting topic. For me, the thing is, I have no idea what
I am going to be up to in the coming decades. What if I want to serve in some
local comminity position? Or create my own company? All of the sudden, that
hasty from-the-hip comment I posted to a forum years ago might actually
matter. I find it quite tiring to stress over my online "brand". Locking down
my Facebook profile has helped, I will say. Using my real name on HN,
especially as someone recently trying to pivot into web dev, has definitely
affected the way I post. I am more considerate, which is good. But I also self
censor more.

The never-forgetful nature of the web definitely changes things.

------
Systemic33
It all really comes down to how far you want to take anonymity. I think the
first thing to do is dox yourself, and methodically go through the websites
and both change all info to random unrelated information, and then delete or
deactivate, whatever is possible. The next step without taking drastic
measures such as new identity, is to simply stop using the internet. And
remember to not be included in digital pictures. The abstinence from the
internet is what I think is the hardest part, especially if the internet has
become an integral part of your life.

~~~
downer88
That means not owning a cell phone. Maybe not using a phone at all. Even
possessing a land line or using pay phones might not work.

You also need to use cash. But possibly only make withdrawals directly from a
human bank teller, and not an ATM. You'll still show up on bank cameras
though. Maybe check cashing and pawn shops is the way to go. Just having a
bank account could be problematic, because oft he transaction register.

Using paper cash, you'll still have to consider serial numbers on bills as
clues in the long run. Like it or not, the paths of exchange that bills follow
can be traced to a degree, using the same imaging software that post offices
use on mail, and banks use on paper checks. It's not as reliable for the
smaller bills, but for larger denominations, they tend to take short paths
exiting the bank (mostly via ATM) and then immediately returning to the bank
through business deposits.

So even if you float through space, absorbing all light like a black hole,
your gravity will still influence the light-emitting bodies around you.

------
herbig
Even if someone can successfully go "off the grid" never using a cellphone or
computer, and paying for everything with cash you keep stuffed under your
mattress, mentions of your name and images of you will inevitably appear in
others' emails, Facebook posts, and whatever else.

In addition, eventually with facial recognition and the high density of
security cameras, going anywhere other than the middle of the nowhere will be
building a database of your movements.

This is all more than enough to build an accurate profile of you.

------
wil421
I think that the question is "How can I _mitigate_ the risk my online identity
poses?"

Once on the web I dont think you can get off, the tag I use on HN is one I
have used for years, but in those past years I was always a lurker almost
never ever commenting (until recently). Now when I search my tag on google HN
comments come up, my NSA comments could label me as anti-govt, but thats not
the case.

Without going RMS I dont think you can really get off-web if you still want to
use the internet in any fashion.

------
XorNot
You know the answer might be to, you know, not worry about it? I mean it's a
two part process (1) are people coming after you with the internet? If no,
then (2) pay some attention to your local politics, be wary of advocating for
discriminatory policies when it suits you, and remember no man is ever an
island.

If yes, well, you kind of did the wrong thing posting on StackExchange about
it.

------
damon_c
The hard part is that in the next decade or so, there is going to no longer be
an "off-web".

Your face, walk, voice and probably the pattern of places you go and the smell
of your breath will be just another set of tracking cookies for which you will
be unable to switch browsers to be rid of.

Say goodbye to "incognito mode".

------
jheriko
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...

~~~
rpgmaker
This brings up an interesting question: who are you on the web anyways? Take
my case: I have never signed up for a social networking account on the likes
of facebook, myspace, etc. I just don't like to give up that much control
about my personal information. To me, just putting it out there, even without
the govt snooping on it is giving up WAY too much control over it _. Many
websites I used to visit have become "social" over the years though but no
matter, I don't use my real name there, or real personal email account. On my
android phone I purposely created another gmail account, not linked to my real
personal one. I have avoided google+ like a plague and I have seen first hand
how nuclear they have gone in order to make people enable the goddamn +
account_ _. But the question still remains, who am I online? I 'm still
signing up to sites and email accounts that even if they don't represent the
whole picture they still have parts of it. It struck me that it may not matter
if those accounts don't particularly link to my real name: it is still me
doing all that stuff online. Am I just my name or what I do? (Google probably
doesn't care that much about my "name", they're still getting a lot of
information from "me". To them all of us are probably just a unique ID on
their servers.

_I'm not a tinfoil hat kind of guy or anything like that. My efforts are still
limited by the convenience of the internet once you sign up to the many
services available. People somewhat skilled in tracking people online can
probably still track the real me: just because I haven't made much effort in
actively learning all I would need to do in order to really hide myself
online. I still think that I at least have mitigated it a bit so that not any
Joe Schmoe can track me. __First I couldn 't review apps on the play store,
now I can't comment on youtube wtf?? but still, you will have to do more than
that to get me on, google. I still think that they will end up forcing
everyone to g+ in the end, at that point I will seriously consider just
leaving google altogether.

------
njharman
Only by removing the motives (profit and control _) of those who wish to track
and monitor everything. Good luck with that.

_ By "control" I mean enforcement of laws, security(government, corporate,
etc. internal/external), oppression, and the like.

------
ams6110
You can't erase what you've already done online. Moving forward, you could
live like a person from 1950. No mobile phone, no internet, pay cash for
stuff. That's about as close to anonymous as you can get, if it's worth the
pain.

~~~
user24
I've moved over to cash for 95% of things that aren't bills, it's quite
liberating.

------
alberto_rico
It's probably easier to change your offline identity. Bureaucracy can be dealt
with, plastic surgery results are in continuous improvement... And you can
even start a new family, damnit.

But The Internet never forgets.

------
JoeAltmaier
Easier to change your name.

