Keeping Personal Information Out and Using an Alias to Hide Your Real Identity

If you are reading this but have no need for anonymity and really can’t see where it would fit into your Internet life, I at least hope you can imagine a situation where someone else might need it. To maximize the anonymity you can acquire on the Internet, you can’t just do things like buy a VPN, use a good email provider, and browse through Tor. You also need to consider the information you are posting on the Internet.

A general concept people use to disguise themselves is to post Disinformation (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation), or information that is purposefully false/fake. Most of the time, people do this by coming up with an alias or alter identity that consists of a username that isn’t like their other ones and creating fake accounts that don’t link back to them. So if I wanted to communicate anonymously with someone and not let them know who I was, I could acquire a VPN account and register for a Tutanota email or Wire account and message them while connected to my VPN and/or the Tor Browser. As long as I didn’t give out identifying information about me like my name, location, age, or links to real media, I should be safe from an attack.

To take this one step further, you can attempt to remove all of your other personally identifying information from the Internet. Keep in mind though that this is generally a very hard challenge to overcome because once it is online, you can't be sure it is ever going to get erased. This is why it is important to try and minimize the information you are posting based on the kind of threat model you have. It helps in situations where you need to hold up a persona online but not have said alias connect in any way to your real identity.