
How to disappear from the internet - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/19/exposed-how-to-disappear-from-the-internet
======
salawat
This is why AdNet needs to die.

Imagine if you will if a door to door salesman did what developers, software,
and ad companies do.

They would:

A) Insist on seeing everything and everyone in your house before even telling
you anything.

B) Go back to a van and call every other salesman to share what they saw, even
if you said "Not interested."

C) Pose as the mailman, taking your letters, opening them, and dispatching
salesmen to your house later.

D) Eventually, your salesman would end up knowing more about your family than
YOU do. He starts showing up offering birth control to your teenage daughter.
Low-T supplements to your son.

E) You just got your kids smartphones! Now THEY have their very own dedicated
salesman! Timmy's can be especially disruptive with his sales pitches during
dinner.

F) Uh oh! Why's that Federal Agent talking to that salesman on the way to our
house?

G) Heck, why are INSURANCE people trying to...is that a BANKER, and what is my
HR person doing here?!

This new slice of 20XX life brought to you by AdNet!

Accept/Not Interested?

~~~
mrighele
> Accept/Not Interested?

Did you mean Accept/Remind me later?

~~~
pasbesoin
Accept. AKA, "You will comply."

P.S. If I could afford it, I would have started putting everything I do behind
shell companies, years ago.

Not because I resent taxes. I still believe "you get what you pay for" \-- as
long as you are also paying some attention and care to what is being
purchased. (You can't "outsource" your care and involvement.)

But because I value my privacy and autonomy. And a fair playing field --
everyone gets e.g. insurance protection and banking services. And you don't
get dinged for being friends with someone with a less than stellar social
metric (e.g. past conviction, done their time, being a decent person, now).

I wouldn't feel the need for the shell companies, except in response to the
way "business" and data mining have been going.

~~~
briandear
And you have really hinted at why FATCA is so distructive to overseas
Americans..

~~~
indemnity
Only Americans? AEOI was inspired by FATCA and has started going into effect.

(Automatic Exchange of Information).

E.g. I have a bank account in Europe somewhere and automatically details of
the account, its balance, etc get forwarded to my local tax authority. The
scope of what gets forwarded is maybe a bit limited right now but these things
have a tendency to only increase in scope.

If you think you’re not affected as a citizen of a European or other developed
country such as Australia/Canada, think again. All OECD countries are taking
part, and at least a few non-OECD countries.

~~~
squiggleblaz
If you think you're not affected because you're in Australia, you're just
deluded.

------
rinze
I think I was lucky: I was born soon enough that I could use the Internet as a
reckless teenager and very little trace of that remains (unless someone has
logs from long-crashed private forums, or IRC logs). People born not long ago,
in many parts of the planet, don't have this luxury. Everything is a constant
archive of your life.

~~~
b5
I'm the same, and very grateful that the mistakes and generally embarrassing
stuff I posted probably didn't get archived or saved anywhere. The contents of
my Xoom site are long gone, and so are the comments in my BeSeen guestbook.
Someone, somewhere, maybe has logs from irc.scifi.com circa 1998, but they're
certainly not published.

I think this right to fail without a trace is an important one, and one that,
intentionally or not, we've taken away from those who came after us.

~~~
st26
No one has a _right_ to have their mistakes hidden, though certainly we could
talk about whether a merciful & forgiving society should forget because it's
the right thing to do.

~~~
ianai
Actually it’s my understanding that kids have their records cleared once they
hit 18 in the US. I don’t know the full specifics of that or whether it
applies in only certain states/locals. But I think there is logic to it that
also suggests allowing people a rewrite.

~~~
custos
It varies by state: [http://www.vocativ.com/412398/juvenile-criminal-records-
myth...](http://www.vocativ.com/412398/juvenile-criminal-records-
myth/index.html)

------
auslander
Nobody will be nice, ever. Get it. All is sold.

Stop sharing info now. Go underground. Recently lost job application, bank
loan, girl on dating site, citizenship, restaurant booking? Thank me in 10
years.

Someone asks you for date of birth. Give fake one. 'Security questions' \-
Where you were born - fake one - London, UK. Mobile phone, gender, address,
zip codes - fake ones. Use password managers to remember fake answers.

Only government services might need real data.

~~~
orf
And any companies posting things to you.

------
forapurpose
> "Deleting stuff is just useless. It’s already [been] there. Perhaps the
> person looking for you copied the information. So it becomes a game of total
> misdirection: you have to keep the predator busy.”

This technique applies much more widely than personal privacy. It's exactly
how propagandists/trolls work: Keep the seekers of truth busy. In the case of
propaganda, the roles are reversed, of course; the seekers are the good guys,
but the trolls' method is the same.

HN is particularly susceptible to it. Its method for dealing with bad
information is that honest users will correct it with good information - the
old, generally good idea that the answer to bad speech is more speech.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what the trolls want, to keep the seekers of
truth busy and not addressing the real issues. And the contest is highly
asymmetrical: anyone can post a falsehood in seconds; it can take hours or
more for the honest person to find the truth of it. The HN approach assumes a
pact of good faith; propagandists take advantage of that pact. HN also forbids
calling someone a troll, so the guidelines create for them, in a way, a safe,
protected playground. I haven't looked at the front page discussion about
Chinese foreign policy today, but I bet I know what I'll find.

The solutions aren't easy; this technique wasn't invented by social media end
users, but long before the Internet by intelligence professionals.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
> HN is particularly susceptible to it. Its method for dealing with bad
> information is that honest users will correct it with good information - the
> old, generally good idea that the answer to bad speech is more speech.

But remember with HN that "truth" is groupthink. There are many topics you
cannot discuss here, even rationally. You will be punished with -1's, rate
limiting, flagged/killed, shadowbanning, or other tools only those with more
points (Read: positive groupthink) have.

I came to HN for the hard discussion about technology. I find that unless I
agree with the elites in Silicon Valley, that my opinions and facts are not
wanted or cared about.

And regarding the "the old, generally good idea that the answer to bad speech
is more speech."....

You're commenting too fast. Slow down. (In other words, shut the fuck up and
go away.)

~~~
forapurpose
> HN that "truth" is groupthink

Not in my experience. I mean, people are people everywhere, but IMHO HN is
exceptional is this regard; I see less of it here than almost anywhere else.

> unless I agree with the elites in Silicon Valley, that my opinions and facts
> are not wanted or cared about.

The phrase "elites in Silicon Valley" conveys a lot. It throws some (unknown)
individuals into a group, characterizes them all as just a stereotype, pigeon-
holes them all into being representatives of it, and accuses them in the next
sentence of abusing this role that someone else put them in. Personally, I
don't know who the phrase refers to; I find that the responses I get here rely
much more on the soundness of my fact, reasoning, and expertise than on
premeditated opinion, and the quality of my communication.

> You're commenting too fast. Slow down. (In other words, shut the fuck up and
> go away.)

That's produced by an algorithm; I wouldn't take it personally.

~~~
MikkoFinell
> Not in my experience. I mean, people are people everywhere, but IMHO HN is
> exceptional is this regard; I see less of it here than almost anywhere else.

As an experiment, go to some relevant thread and courteously imply you don't
share the belief that Rust is the greatest invention since penicillin.

Then watch what happens to your karma.

~~~
pjc50
That depends a _lot_ on how you present that argument.

------
welly
Just googled myself for the first time in years. I was surprised how little
information about me exists. It took until page 5 for a reference to me rather
than other people with the same name and that was in relation to a limited
company I us to have when I was a contractor. I only appear again 8 pages
later.

I've removed myself from all social media since the start of this year and am
in the process of de-googling myself.

So I'm pretty well hidden it seems. Still have some work to do but so far so
good.

~~~
dofly
In my experience, searching for any English/American (or Russian) name turns
up at least a dozen people with the same first and last names. If a name is
extra generic like John Smith, I don't even bother searching because the task
is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Although, people with an Anglo
name do usually have middle names :) Maybe everyone should take up a generic
name to disappear on the internet?

~~~
Fnoord
Yes, but you should not assume that the person who searches won't specify
additional terms. For example "first_name last_name" yields different results
than "first_name second_name third_name fourth_name last_name" or "first_name
last_name city". It all depends on how eager the person is to find information
about you, and how clever they are with search engine usage. You _cannot_ test
_all_ the parameters!

------
amelius
Best option: inject noise; i.e. create a hundred different copies of yourself,
each with different hobbies and lifestyle. Perhaps you could even pay someone
to do it.

~~~
whataretensors
This likely won't work for long. Detecting fake profiles seems like a solvable
problem with ML.

~~~
itchyjunk
Maybe use ML to generate the right type of noise?

~~~
noonespecial
Great sci-fi in there, No?

Long after the humans were gone, the 2 ai's duked it out as one tried to
invent credible "people" and the other tried to detect them. Finally they
became so locked in the battle, they became like one bicameral mind imagining
a world of "people" to itself until one fine morning they said to themselves
"let there be light" and found it good...

~~~
whataretensors
Starring Goodfellow et al
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661)

------
11thEarlOfMar
Maybe this service already exists...

A web service with VPN interface that instantiates a from-scratch account on
log in and then deletes it when you log off. Do all your browsing this way. If
you actually want to buy something, your credit card information stays with
the service as a middle-man and it makes the payment via it's own banking
interface and keeps a small fee for protecting your privacy.

Many facets not contemplated in that paragraph, but maybe you get the general
idea.

Is there such a service yet? 'Anonymous' access to the Internet and still have
the useful bits available?

~~~
tomohawk
There's authentic8

[https://info.authentic8.com/product](https://info.authentic8.com/product)

------
nurblieh
I'm reminded of the long-form Wired article, "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to
Vanish: Here’s What Happened" (Ratliff 2009).

    
    
      "Along the way they’d also proven my privacy to be a
      modern fiction. It turns out that people — ordinary 
      people — really can gather an incredible dossier of facts
      about you."
    

It turns out the public's short attention span has it's benefits,

    
    
      "But a month later, life was back to normal and no one 
      was taking any interest."
    

[1]
[https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff_vanish2/](https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff_vanish2/)

------
mirimir
The examples in the article are mostly people who want to disappear in
meatspace. Not specifically on the Internet. That's hard, unless you totally
drop out of modern society. Or have resources to create shell corporations.

Disappearing on the Internet, however, is pretty easy. Just delete all of your
old accounts. Email, social media, everything. You can check periodically for
traces, as long as you use Tor. Or better, Tor accessed through a VPN, or
through nested VPN chains.

But really, even that is usually not necessary. Just compartmentalize. For
anything that you wouldn't share freely with the police, potential employers,
your family or whatever, use a persona. Indeed, have multiple personas. Each
one should be isolated from others. Different VMs, or perhaps different
hardware. Different LAN. Different path to the Internet.

------
auslander
2012-2020 will be named 'Data theft years' in future Wikipedia article 'Web
Dark Ages'

~~~
quickthrower2
Depends who is controlling (or trolling) wikipedia.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290)

------
zem
reminded of brunner's classic "the shockwave rider"
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider)]

if you are at all a science fiction fan and you've not read brunner, i would
strongly recommend his "big four" books at least - "stand on zanzibar", "the
shockwave rider", "the jagged orbit" and "the sheep look up". he has a
startlingly prescient vision of the kinds of dystopias we could be headed for.

~~~
bookofjoe
Thank you for this. For me, one of the best things about HN are the book and
movie recommendations that occasionally appear in Comments. The likelihood
I'll enjoy said titles is higher than that of recommendations from any other
source, online or in print.

------
paulpauper
It's really easy to get your Facebook account permanent and irrevocably
deleted :

just start spamming some links on public pages. after you do this a dozen
times, Facebook will disable or shadow-ban your account , rendering it
completely invisible for everyone but you, esp if you do it really quickly and
the links are obvious spam

~~~
zrobotics
Protip:before you start, make sure to change your name to nudeCelebsForFree.

I can't check, but does FB even allow name changes anymore?

~~~
softawre
they did a few months ago when I changed mine away from my real name

------
Rjevski
Related: [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-
can-s...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-can-someone-
go-off-web-and-anonymise-themselves-after-a-life-online)

~~~
georgrwasington
How was this question not flagged as unrelated to information security? The
main problem with stackexchange (aside from closing your questions) is not
knowing how they will interpret their own rules.

~~~
C14L
That's because flagging and rule application is not centralized. Once you have
a certain number of points from helping others, you get the right to flag
questions. Not everybody does is correctly right away. But over time and on
average, its a pretty good system. Better than having mods that may ego trip
or follow some personal agenda. Also, if a good question gets closed, other
users can flag it to be re-opened.

------
throwawaysa
Sometime back, I registered a few domains with Gandi. Now, when I google my
email, two of these domains are returned complete with my personal details
from a site called cutestat. Anyone knows what a non Europe based person can
do to have that information deleted?

~~~
Guest9812398
After the 25th, send them a polite email saying you're a European resident,
and you would like your personal data erased. Or if they have a contact form,
visit their site from a European VPN, and submit a support request. If they
question it, because your personal information says you live in the US, just
say you relocated to Germany a few years ago, or you're dual citizenship with
a European spouse. It's likely not worth their time to argue and risk a
potential complaint.

~~~
throwawaysa
Great perspective, I see.

------
alasdair_
What about making personal information owned by that person and adding a UK-
style Data Protection Act to allow people to demand their data from you and
correct or delete it if it's wrong?

If it's in the public interest for the government to bring criminal charges
against copyright violators, it's in the public interest to do the same for
people who copy personal information without consent.

------
saudioger
Data brokers make this nearly impossible. They just horde public record so you
can't really do much to stop it.

------
geggam
Good luck with that, you might do it in a rural area but then you are the
nutter hermit guy everyone talks about.

------
andraganescu
# What if we had an Advertising ID API in the browser?

With an Advertising ID I could be in charge of the things I want tracked about
myself, an opt in participation, not only a generic yes or no, instead, a
detailed approach on tracking.

If I had an advertising ID that the browser allows me to manage, and which
would be common across all browsers, there would be definitely no need to have
that much effort thrown away at identifying Internet users with all kinds of
trickery.

1\. I just provide this advertising ID to all advertisers by default. 2\. Then
I choose what I want tracked. THE BROWSER then tracks said items in an
anonymous mode, transmitting non identifiable information only (such as
product names, SKUs, Page contents, even links but say in a screwed up order).
3\. Then I can ban advertisers or networks that show me crap. One by one.

It would be a shared effort.

The user will do some work, but they will have the tools required for the
work. The banning and defaults will be scriptable and people could solve 80%
of the problems with easy scripted actions (via browser extensions and such).
Advertisers will have to work with anonymous details, but they will be able to
precisely target people, after they solve the math involved with working with
irregular data sets.

Advertising is the financial engine of the Internet and all this rage against
it won’t make it disappear or behave nicely. Browser vendors need to work
together and they need to do so in the same way they did it for so long: to
implement open web specifications.

Advertising is just another kind of technology that the browser needs to
support!

Advertising ID would be a solid base for all the freemium content to have the
legitimacy required to block users who don’t provide a way in for advertisers.
Once we get technology that is as safe as the Internet overall is, we can then
teach people how to use it, and shut out sociopathic behaviour of money crazed
folk to the obscure corners of forsaken random domain names.

The Better Ads Standards is just talk. We need tech that supports it and it
should be a browser implementation of an open standard with an Advertising ID
API. People will flock to the best support of a good standard. Everybody wins
and competition stays healthy.

It is illogical to rip off the internet of it’s best lucrative asset: the
capacity to target advertising with great precision. It is dangerous that for
the same reason should the Internet become the looking glass of Big Brother.
And the tech to stop this from happening, while maintaining money flow for
Internet growth is easily achievable.

Do you thing an Advertising Standard with an Advertising ID API would make the
Internet better?

------
Buge
>This year it was revealed that in 2004, [...] Mark Zuckerberg, sent an
instant message [...]

>“People just submitted it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I don’t know why. They ‘trust
me’.”

>“Dumb fucks,” he added, after a pause.

That was revealed much earlier than "this year". Here's an article from 2010:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-
ims...](http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-
help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5)

------
55555
> "Just until I could raise the funds to pay back my investors."

Charles Ponzi would be proud

------
finphil
Would make a great TV series :)

~~~
celim307
Imposters comes close

------
auslander
Half through the article, but boy, it looks cool :D

1) Compartmentalize - awful word, meaning new skin (virtual Id). Better call
it Id separation. U must use new

1.1) Make new Id with new names, nicks, adresses, countries, stories

1.2) Buy new devices (MAC adresses) paying cash. Best to use separate MacBook
/ iPad / iPhone. Apple security beats Windows and Android flat.

Scanning WiFi access point traffic shows all connected devices by MAC. Your
device pings available WiFis revealing the MAC.

1.3) locations / networks (locations by IP). Always use VPN in always-on mode
(DNS leaks). Different VPN provider for every device (and Id), paying BitCoin
or 3rd-party deals via PayPal. Same device on a different network can be
tracked via browser (browser fingerprinting). So, separate devices.

Install uBlock Origin in advanced/medium mode to every browser and use Private
browsing tabs only (tracking cookies).

1.4) New Id's social profiles (FB and rest). Takes effort, get pictures from
google images, and so on. Good profile will be 6 months old at least. Buy
friends.

Classical error - logging in as Id1 from device/network(by location) assigned
to Id2.

2) ...

