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How to disappear from the internet
- auslander 8y agoHalf 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) ...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoBest 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 8y agoThis likely won't work for long. Detecting fake profiles seems like a solvable problem with ML.
- itchyjunk 8y agoMaybe use ML to generate the right type of noise?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jacobush 8y agoYes, but you would need to know when it succeeds and when it fails - how else can you train it? Solve this, and it's plausible.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- evv 8y agoThis would make for a cool open source project. Create a custom client for your favorite AdTech company, which injects real-looking noise into the data, blocks the resulting ads, and provide a decent interface to the content you actually need. If somebody wants to get started on this, I'd be happy to build the front-end. (email is in my profile)
- noonespecial 8y agoGreat 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 8y agoStarring Goodfellow et al https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661
- gricardo99 8y ago
- bytematic 8y agoAd nauseum
- expertentipp 8y agoOne cannot disappear but one can blur. Blurring strongly enough is synonymous with disappearing (will work as long as one is not famous/public person).
- Dragon256 8y agoIt's a great idea and I know people who are working on this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- salawat 8y agoThis 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?
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoUnfortunately many of the entities like google and facebook and others are too entrenched to fail in the next 8 years or so. There isn't enough political will (currently) to impose strong regulations in the US, as evidenced by the Zuckerberg hearing, and it will likely take an entire political party embracing the ideals to actually build up the regulatory framework
- whataretensors 8y agoThe way I understand regulation is that it usually entrenches the existing players, making it even harder to fail.
- nerdwaller 8y agoIt definitely seems like it often does, simply by raising the barrier to entry requiring a lot more hoops to jump through.
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoThat happens because the actual efforts are so watered down that they don't actually stop the offensive actions. Take Money Laundering. One of the largest vehicles is real estate. The National Association of Realtors lobbied hard for an exemption to the AML rules, and they were granted a temporary exemption that was extended multiple times: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title31-vol1/pdf/CFR-2010-title31-vol1-sec103-170.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title31-vol1/pdf/CFR-...
- rinze 8y agoI 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 8y agoI'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.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI’m intrigued by your idea, but I don’t understand. I think of a right as something inalienable—even if it’s blocked, you still have it. And morally unquestionable. I have a right to move about my country freely, so long as I don’t interfere with people. I believe I can morally use violence to defend myself on someone else’s “property”. Of course the U.S. disagrees. They think someone simply buying a deed is enough to strip me of that right. We’ll see if the U.S. ever recognizes my right. I believe Finland does. But I don’t understand the right you’re referencing. It seems to amount to: if I do something when I am a child, I have a right to use physical violence to stop people from telling stories about it later. And you want this right to be recognized by the courts so you can use the police to exact that force, rather than doing it yourself and risking your own incarceration. Is that right? Sorry I’m extrapolating your position. I know you didn’t say that directly, but I am trying to understand what legal reality you are hoping for and what you mean when you say “right”.
- krapp 8y ago>But I don’t understand the right you’re referencing. It seems to amount to: if I do something when I am a child, I have a right to use physical violence to stop people from telling stories about it later. You seem to be using "physical violence" in the sense that anarchists to do when referring to states and their monopoly on force, yet there is no physical violence involved in the removal of data from a database, and I'm not aware of any laws which insist upon using the police, incarceration or similar coercion to enforce such removal. I believe you're being disingenuous in implying that one political construct (the "right to be forgotten") is rooted in thuggishness while another (the "right to roam") is a universal, and therefore morally pure, constant.
- welly 8y agoJust 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.
- b5 8y agoI'm fortunate in that I don't come up in the first 10 or so pages if you google my name. I've never gone deeper than that. It's a combination of a pretty generic name and an early, almost accidental, decision not to use my full name on any social network -- mostly I'll just use my first. I didn't really plan it, but I'm glad I accidentally ended up ungoogleable.
- Washuu 8y agoMy entire set of real names is basically a string of generic names. They also happen to conflict with a famous sports ball player and another professional. Finding me on the internet is difficult.
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoEven after you leaked that info?
- Washuu 8y agoYes. I even go to the lengths to seed my online identity with other names to add confusion to anyone looking me up.
- dofly 8y agoIn 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?
- finphil 8y agoWould make a great TV series :)
- auslander 8y ago2012-2020 will be named 'Data theft years' in future Wikipedia article 'Web Dark Ages'
- quickthrower2 8y agoDepends who is controlling (or trolling) wikipedia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290
- throwawaysa 8y agoSometime 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?
- omgtehlion 8y agoYou can not really delete this info: there are multiple "whois history" sites out there, and if you manage to persuade each one to remove old info, it would still be stored in numerous dumps one can find on closed forums or torrents. Source: I myself have my (now outdated) phone number and home address attached to several domains...
- Guest9812398 8y agoAfter 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 8y agoGreat perspective, I see.
- Rjevski 8y agoRelated: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-can-someone-go-off-web-and-anonymise-themselves-after-a-life-online https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-can-s...
- georgrwasington 8y agoHow 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.
- reitanqild 8y agoThis kind of surprised me: "This question was featured as an Information Security Question of the Week. Read the Jan 27, 2014 blog entry for more details or submit your own Question of the Week." I feel a similar question on stackoverflow would quickly have been flagged as not constructive or something.
- C14L 8y agoThat'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.
- zem 8y agoreminded 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 8y agoThank 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.
- nurblieh 8y agoI'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/
- auslander 8y agoNobody 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 8y agoAnd any companies posting things to you.
- iMerNibor 8y ago> 'Security questions' Not only should you do this for privacy, but also security. It's quite simple to get the answers to some of the questions websites will ask you.. Switching to random strings saved by a password manager (in a different file, with a different master key preferably), or written down on paper and stored securely is probably the best way to handle this
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoMaybe 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?
- tylergetsay 8y agoyou could roll your own with a VPN and privacy.com
- tomohawk 8y agoThere's authentic8 https://info.authentic8.com/product https://info.authentic8.com/product
- 64kbisalluneed 8y ago#deletegoogle
- auslander 8y agogoogle frightens me most. Your kids share their assignments to it, your company uses it for all comms, you use it for private messages, you tell it your secret desires via searches, it knows who you're with at any point of time with android location ... Google Home? My home? SkyNet must be destroyed now.
- forapurpose 8y ago> "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 8y ago> 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 8y ago> 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.
- paulpauper 8y agoIt'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
- darkkindness 8y agoThis sounds too easy, so I'm gonna have to ask: does that actually work? Have you done this?
- zrobotics 8y agoProtip:before you start, make sure to change your name to nudeCelebsForFree. I can't check, but does FB even allow name changes anymore?
- softawre 8y agothey did a few months ago when I changed mine away from my real name
- daniel-alex 8y agoIf I am still able to see it afterwards, I think we have different definitions of "permanent and irrevocably deleted".
- teddyh 8y agoHow does your account being shadowbanned or disabled matter if Facebook themselves still has your complete account, and will readily sell access to aggregated info which includes all information associated with your account?
- saudioger 8y agoData brokers make this nearly impossible. They just horde public record so you can't really do much to stop it.
- geggam 8y agoGood luck with that, you might do it in a rural area but then you are the nutter hermit guy everyone talks about.
- mirimir 8y agoThe 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.
- 55555 8y ago> "Just until I could raise the funds to pay back my investors." Charles Ponzi would be proud
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andraganescu 8y ago# 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?
- alasdair_ 8y agoWhat 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.
- Buge 8y ago>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-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...