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Chapter 1: Digital traces and identities online

Digital shadows

How much data exists about you? What kind of traces do you leave behind about your identity, your networks, and your habits when you use digital services? How does this connect to who you are online and who you are offline? What can someone who wants to harm you or investigate you, actually find out?

Your digital shadows are the stories that data tell about you. They are created by trillions of traces, or bits of data, left behind in the digital world when you connect online, use your mobile phone or when the objects around you send information to internet. These bits of data can include your name, location, contacts, photos, messages, tweets and likes, but also the brand of your computer, length of your phone calls and information about which websites you visit.

These traces are created by you actively sharing information about yourself (tweets, photos, online purchases etc) and people sharing information about you by tagging you in pictures, mentioning you in tweets or simply by communicating with you. There are also traces which are passively created, without you necessarily realising it, or consenting to it. For example, your browsing habits and IP address are shared amongst websites you visit and services you use in order to track your behaviour and try to sell you products through advertising.

Who collects data?

You might wonder about the importance of one picture, one message, or one call. You might think there is so much data out there that nobody knows what to do with it, or cares that much about it.

However, there are in reality a number of parties interested in this data - including companies, governments and individuals - and data collection and data analysis is by now very sophisticated. The data traces you leave behind online are constantly being collected, analysed and sorted by various parties to create profiles on you; and every time a new piece of data is aggregated, it can be identified and added to your profile. These profiles are ever-expanding, and give those who create them or who have access to them an immense insight into who you are.

Data is collected by these companies, governments and individuals for a variety of purposes. Profiles can be bought and sold; data can be used to control, suppress or silence; or it can be used to create harassment strategies.

Anyone could potentially have access to your digital shadow – including communications service providers, law enforcement agencies and commercial companies, as well as groups and individuals running their own servers.

Exploring

You can't know exactly what is happening to our digital shadow, and that itself is a problem. Although this situation might seem dire, the idea is not to get paralyzed by paranoia but to try out different methods for controlling and minimising your shadows. Some examples include reducing the amount of data you give away; consciously stripping valuable information from content and metadata; exercising the art of self-doxing; and thinking about ways to play with and break up your online identity.

The strategies and tools detailed below can increase your privacy, and help you to be more secure, both online and offline - without being less vocal or reducing your activity online. To move towards getting some control over your digital shadow, a good place to start is to see what it looks like (as far as is possible) and explore the size, deepness and characteristics of your digital shadow:

  • Trace My Shadow – https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow – is a tool launched by Tactical Tech that allows you to see what traces you are leaving online, and it offers a lot of tips on how to protect your privacy.
  • Identifying and materialising social networks across your online and physical activities: John Fass, researcher and designer at the Royal College of Art, offers some activities for visualising your social networks and browser history ' [insert link].'
  • A tool called OpenPaths.cc allows you to see through the eyes of your mobile phone. Read the Terms of Service carefully and explore if you can change the access settings in your phone. On an iPhone you can change the permissions for each app under its privacy setting. LINK??

Self-Doxing

Doxing describes tracing or gathering information about someone using sources that are freely available on the internet and constitute a type of social engineering technique. This method depends on the ability of the attacker to recognise valuable information about their target, and to use this information for their own ends. Doxing is premised on the idea that the more you know about your target, the easier it will be to find their flaws. "Self-doxing" ourselves can help us to make informed decisions about what we share online, and how. Of course, these same instruments can also be used to learn more about someone we have met online before we give them our full trust.

Methods used for doxing include exploring archives, images, phone directories and other publicly available information; querying common search engines like Google or DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com); looking for a person's profile in specific services; searching for information in public forums and mailing lists. But it can also simply consist in looking up the public information on the owner of a website, through a simple "whois search" (see the section on "Creating a site of one’s own"). Before we start exploring these web services and looking for our digital self, a good idea is to use anonymisation tools like Torbrowser. Useful tips on self-doxing tools and techniques can be found here:

Controlling

The good news is that you can partly control what content and metadata you give away. When you publish content on the web, it is always a good idea to ask yourself if what you are posting is public or personal and who could have access to it. Even if the information is connected to a public event and not to your personal life, the names you mention or the images you upload may contribute to a picture about who you are, what you are doing, where you are doing it and so on. This could be used by people who wish to target you.

This does not mean that you should silence yourself – by taking some basic measures, you can limit your risks by increasing the level of the effort that would be required to attack you or your contacts.

  • When giving personal information to a web service, it’s best to use HTTPS so that the communication channel is secure (see the section on security measures for more on this).
  • Using Tor will hide specific metadata like your IP address, thereby increasing your anonymity online.
  • Use strong and different passwords for each web service you use - if not, someone that intercepts your password could use it to access your other accounts.
  • When sharing personal details about your life, you can use private profiles that can only be accessed by selected contacts. When using those on commercial social media, you should be aware of the regular changes to the privacy policies of that platform. There have been cases where privacy settings have been changed, exposing pictures, content and conversations of private groups.
  • When writing or posting images about public events on the web, you should ask yourself if the information you spread about single individuals, places and other details could be used to identify and/or attack someone. It is always a good idea to ask for permission to write about individuals and perhaps also to discuss shared agreements about posting information on public events.
  • You can prevent the tracking and collection of metadata through your browser by installing add-ons like Privacy Badger or Adblock Plus, as well as by monitoring your privacy settings and deleting cookies on a regular basis.
  • When registering a device or software such as Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others, not using your real name can help prevent the metadata created when using this device or software from being connected to you. You can also switch off the GPS tracker in your phone or camera.
  • Some file types contain more metadata than others, so when publishing contents online you can change files from ones that contain a lot of metadata (such as .doc and .jpeg) to ones that don’t (such as .txt and .png), or you can use plain text.
  • For editing or removing metada from PDF files, Windows or MAC OS users can use programs such as Adobe Acrobat XI Pro (for which a trial version is available). GNU/Linux users can use PDF MOD, a free and open source tool. However, it doesn’t remove the creation or modification timestamp, and it also doesn’t remove the information about the type of device used to create the PDF.

Mapping our social domains

As security expert Bruce Schneier explains, “Security is a chain, and a single weak link can break the entire system”. Everyone belongs to several social domains - your work or advocacy networks, your family networks, friends, and sports teams. Some networks may feel more secure than others. For example, you may tend to have a more secure communication practices for your work or advocacy activities, but less secure practices for interacting with friends on a social networking platform.

If you use a single identity in all your domains, or if you always use your real name online, it becomes easier to gather information about you and to identify your vulnerabilities. For example, if you reveal in a social networking platform that you like a particular kind of game, an attacker who wants to investigate your work or advocacy activities might trick you into downloading a game which is infected with spyware.

This is only possible, however, if your work identity and your gaming profile can be connected to the same person; and this is why separating your social domains can be useful. More on how to do this will be addressed later on, when we talk about identity management.

To separate your social domains, it's helpful to first map them out and identify which ones could expose you most. You can do this by thinking about your different activities and networks, and reflecting how sensitive each of these is in order to better separate the domains that are sensitive from those that are not.

For instance, Polish computer security researcher Joanna Rutkowska has developed a Linux distribution based on the concept of “security by isolation” called Qubes OS. In this system, each social domain is isolated in a separate virtual machine. The three basic domains Rutkowska identifies for herself are:

  • The work domain, including her work email, work PGP keys, reports, slides, papers, etc. She also has a less-trusted “work-pub” domain for things like accepting LinkedIn invites or downloading pictures for her presentations.
  • The personal domain includes personal email and calendar, holiday photos, videos, etc. She adds to this with a special domain called “very-personal”, which she uses for the encrypted communication with her partner.
  • The red domain includes the totally untrusted areas which don’t require her to provide any sensitive information.

You can find more details about her scheme here: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html

Deleting identities

If you decide to separate your social domains by creating multiple identities, you should decide whether to delete or keep the identity or identities that you already have. To do this, you can start by investigating the traces of your existing identity or identities. (For methods and tools for following your own digital traces, see "Exploring your digital shadow" and "Self-Doxing"). If you opt for deleting existing accounts, you can visit the following places:

Separating identities online

Once you have identified your different social domains and the digital activities and contacts that go with them, what you need to do is decide if you want to differentiate your identities accordingly, or if you'd rather stick to your official name and true face for each of them.

You may want to keep your work connected to your legal or "real" identity, or think that your activism should be anonymous, but these are decisions that need to be thought about carefully. For example, a journalist who finds it convenient to use her real identity for her writing may decide to stay in contact with her personal domain through a nickname, so that nobody can connect the two spheres together.

On the other hand, if an activist decides that she wants to use a pseudonym for her online activities, she should consider that she will be showing her face in all her connected activities in the real world, such as speaking at conferences or participating in demonstrations. Her online pseudonym will therefore be linked to her face; but her face could also be linked to her real name on social media, and her online activism identity unmasked.

In assessing which identity to use in a given context, it's helpful to consider for each specific context the following questions:

  • Would my job, livelihood or safety be at risk if my real identity were known?
  • Would my mental health or stability be affected if my participation in X were known?
  • Would my family or other loved ones be harmed in any way if my real identity became known?
  • Am I able and willing to maintain separate identities safely?

Once you have assessed our risk, you can then consider different strategies for separating your identities online. For more on assessing risk visit: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/introduction-threat-modeling

Strategies for maintaining separate identities can range from full transparency to full anonymity.

"Real" names

Author Kate Harding (http://kateharding.net/2007/04/14/on-being-a-no-name-blogger-using-her-real-name) talks about her decision to start writing under her real name, dismissing the recommendations that are generally given to bloggers to follow practices like “writing under a pseudonym, making that pseudonym male or gender-neutral if you’re one of them lady bloggers... masking one’s personal information, being circumspect about publishing identifying details, and not writing anything that might inflame the crazies”. Instead of putting responsibility on women, Harding says, problems of harassment should be handled by society as a whole, including men. However, she also acknowledges that the decision is a dangerous one.

Anonymity

On anonymity, Vani, a human rights activist, writes: “I am a regular social network user. I voice my opinions on a range of topics. But I remain faceless and nameless” (http://internetdemocracy.in/media/women-bloggers-seek-safety-in-anonymity%20speaks%20of%20their%20participation%20on%20social%20networks%20anonymously).

Anonymity may be a good choice in settings where you don't need to gain other people's trust, when there are few or no people you can trust, or when you don't want to expose others in your life to risks. When you are researching or participating in message boards about health issues, or when sharing sensitive information for instance, you may wish to set up a one-time account, using a pseudonym, to comment on a blog or news site, or a one-time email account or chat session to discuss sensitive information with others.

But total anonymity can be difficult to maintain and also be dangerous in some countries, where it can signal to the state police that the author thinks they are doing something wrong. This strategy can also be lonely as anonymity can further isolates you, as a blogger underlines: “Can you have a network to protect you and also be anonymous at the same time? Would visibility be a better strategy for you?”

When you adopt anonymity as a strategy you may use pseudonyms, but these should not be used across different networks or social domains, and some may only be used once and then discarded. Because of this, anonymity differs from "persistent pseudonymity". For more information on how to be anonymous online, see the security recommendations at the beginning of this manual and Anonymizing tools in Step0 in the wiki.

Persistent Pseudonymity

Persistent pseudonymity involves a fictitious name consistently over a period of time. In the age of the internet, a pseudonym may also be referred to as a "nickname" or "handle", though the latter can also be tied to a person's legal identity. There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/case-pseudonyms). They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent harassment and discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture.

A pseudonym can be name-shaped (e.g., "Jane Doe") or not. At time of writing, some websites - including Facebook - require that users use their "authentic identity" applying a real name policy which typically means using your legal name or the name by which you are commonly known. This policy has caused many users to lose their Facebook accounts. If we choose to use a pseudonym on social networks, it is important to understand that we can be reported for using a "fake name" and having one's account deleted. A strategy for avoiding that is using a name-shaped pseudonym (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/facebooks-real-name-policy-can-cause-real-world-harm-lgbtq-community).

Persistent pseudonymity also offers visibility, which allows to network with others, and by pinning your voice to a particular name you can develop an online reputation. This depends on others to decide whether you are worthy of trust, and is therefore a crucial aspect in trust-based online communities. Reputation can be developed by consistently using a nickname or pseudonym that can either be connected to your legal identity, or not. The choice to connect your online reputation to your "real" name should be taken individually, according to needs and context.

It is also possible to maintain multiple pseudonyms (and reputations) for different purposes. For example, a person involved in the gaming community and LGBTQI rights activism may wish to maintain separate identities for each purpose, and can build trust within each community separately doing so.

Collective Identity

Another way to be anonymous is through collective participation. General Ludd, Captain Swing, the Guerrilla Girls, Luther Blissett, Anonymous - for centuries groups and like-minded people have participated anonymously in historic protest movements, or have created ground-breaking and provoking artworks or pranks under a collective pseudonym. Besides hiding the identities of the individuals involved, these collective personas have shrouded their feats in an aura of myth and almost magical power. Anonymity through collective identity can translate in a number of things, from a private group or mailing list that puts out collective statements, to a shared Twitter account. While the same security concerns apply, working from behind a collective identity means having the power of the crowd behind you, and can be a good option if you don't wish to reveal your identity.

Comparing strategies

Whatever choice you make, what is important is that you keep your domains effectively separated. No matter how many domains you identify in your digital life, and how many corresponding identities you create, on the internet every identity - even the one bearing your real or legal name - becomes a “virtual” persona and should be managed carefully.

The pros and cons of the various identity options:

Risk Reputation Effort
Real Name "+" "+" "-"
Total Anonymity "-" "-" "+"
Consistent Pseudonimity "-" "+" "+"
Collective Identity "-" "+" "+"


Real name

  • Risk: Using your "real world" identity online means you are easily identifiable by family members, colleagues, and others, and your activities can be linked back to your identity.
  • Reputation: Others can easily identify you, thus gaining reputation and trust is easier.
  • Effort: It requires little effort.

Total anonymity

  • Risk: It can be beneficial at times, but also be very difficult to maintain. Choose this option carefully.
  • Reputation: There are few opportunities to network with others thus to gain trust and reputation.
  • Effort: Intensive as it requires contacts caution. It might also require the use of anonymisation tools (for example Tor or TAILS)

Persistent pseudonymity

  • Risk: Pseudonyms could be linked to your real world identity.
  • Reputation: A persistent pseudonym that others can use to identify you across platforms is a good way to gain reputation and trust.
  • Effort: Maintenance requires some effort, particularly if you are also using your real name elsewhere.

Collective Identity

  • Risk: Possible exposure of your real world identity.
  • Reputation: While not a way to gain individual reputation, you can still benefit from the reputation of the collective.
  • Effort: Although secure communications are still important, it requires less effort than total anonymity.

Creating a new online identity

"Once something is on the internet it will stay on the internet, as the internet does not forget". You may think that deleting certain sensitive data from social networks and web services may be enough to protect yourself, but metadata cannot be deleted as easily. And using just one identity through your whole life - in all your work and personal domains - creates a bulk of information that makes it easier to profile you.

One option to avoid this is to leave an old identity behind and create a new one, or several new ones for each of your social domains. You might also choose to use your real identity in some areas, and your new alternative identities in others.

  • When you create a new identity, you should select the contacts for each one carefully, and avoid sharing contacts with other identities you use for different activities. This effectively creates separate social domains, with separate accounts, mail addresses, browser profiles, apps, and possibly even devices.
  • Your various identities should not linked to each other, or to your real identity. Remember that some of these connections can be tenuous as for example when signing up for a new pseudonymous Gmail account using your real phone number.
  • Disposable extra identities can be useful, as they can be discarded easily if compromised.
  • Disposable extra identities can be created for new acquaintances when appropriate as introductory profiles to get to know somebody before you include them in your more trusted network.

To learn more about how to separate different identities into separate profiles, read the section on “Managing multiple online identities”.

What’s in a name ?

On the internet, platforms that have "real name" policies tend to base this judgment on an individual's legal name, rather than allowing them to identify as they choose. This can be problematic, not only for individuals trying to remain anonymous, but also for transgender individuals, individuals with mononyms, and others.

Because of such restrictions, it can be beneficial to select a "name-shaped" name when choosing a pseudonym. If you want to use commercial social networking platforms, it is better to use a credible name and surname rather than more imaginative ones. Many companies will require that you use both a first name and surname, or a name that doesn't contain any slang terms or profanities.

Once you have decided on a name, a surname, and a username for your virtual persona, you should do thorough research - perhaps also using doxing tools and techniques (see the section on Self-Doxing) - to find out if someone else is already using that name. After all, if you wish to develop your own reputation, you don’t want to be confused with someone else, especially if they don’t share your views of the world!

Then you need to create a story for this virtual persona because if it comes with a story it makes it a lot easier to maintain the role. You can invent a new story if you feel particularly inspired or base your story on a “known” person’s story, a superhero, a fictional character from your favourite novel, or adopt a “collective identity” like Anonymous/Anonymiss or the Guerrilla Girls. In any case when you create an identity you should conceive a whole virtual persona, an avatar that needs to be nurtured and developed in order to become credible.

This page offers some helpful tips for inventing a new identity: http://anonymissexpress.tumblr.com/post/117939311235/you-may-have-noticed

Credible persona

A virtual persona or identity can't be just a name with a mail address and a series of web accounts. If you keep all your normal identifying traits - such as your gender, job, attitude or the way you write - it might be possible for someone to connect the dots and connect your pseudonymous personas with your real identity.

  • Work: Your persona should have a job that is different from yours, but not so different that you don’t know anything about that field: for example, they shouldn’t be a surgeon if you don’t know anything about anatomy!
  • Skills and interests: Similar considerations should be made to select your persona's skills and the main topics they focus on and write about.
  • Linguistic fingerprint: This could be identified through a "stylometric analysis" that makes it possible to identify the author of a particular text. To change this, you can start by using a spell-checker in your word processor to check for consistent typos and you could also think about adopting a different writing attitude. You could adopt one simple rule for each persona, making them shout by only using capital letters, or be a low-talker with a lower-case style, or very excitable, with a lot of exclamation marks.
  • Psychological attitude: A good rule of thumb is to give your persona depth by creating some "weak spots" - but choosing them carefully so that, if the weak spot is attacked, you are able to weather the strikes and even have some fun in the process.

In any case, you should always remember that on the internet, each one of your identities - even the one connected to your real name - is a “virtual” identity, and it is always better to decide what character traits you want to expose in each of them. Creating a somewhat fictional character can be a good idea even for your “real” online identity.

More about how to create a rounded character for your identities here: https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=94049

Managing several identities

Maintaining multiple identities is some work, but like most of these practices, it just requires some patience and attention. The main point is to keep your identities separated otherwise they will very quickly begin to mix with one another. As a start, you can keep notes on your identities to help you to avoid any awkward situations where you confuse one with the other. There also are technical things you can do.

You can create different browser profiles, mailboxes and social media accounts for each of your identities. You can also use different apps for each account/identity and, if you want to take it really seriously, to separate your identities per device or operating system (see 6. A different machine for each identity).

To create multiple profiles with Firefox, visit: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles. For Google Chrome, visit: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

When creating a new mailbox, it is a good idea to connect to the server’s website with Torbrowser and, if a contact email address is required, to think about using a disposable email address instead.

Disposable email addresses

For some activities and social domains you need to manage rounded personas, in order to gain a strong reputation and trust from other members of the community. In some cases, though, all you need is a disposable email address that you only need to use for opening an account in an untrusted platform. This will reduce the number of traces connected to the email address you use for your work or personal life and reduce the amount of spam in your life.

  • Creating a disposable email address: There are many services that offer disposable email addresses. Some of the most privacy-oriented are: https://anonbox.net which gives you a mailbox for a day, offered by the Chaos Computer Club, and https://www.guerrillamail.com which has a public mailbox you can check any time.
  • Using existing disposable email addresses: BugMeNot(http://bugmenot.com) allows people to share their email logins and passwords created for platforms with free registration, for anyone to use.
  • Tools to generate personal details: Fakena.me' (https://fakena.me) is a privacy-oriented '"fake name generator" that will give you all the fake info you need to set up an account (fake name, birth date, US only address, username and password) as well as a link to an associated guerillamail mailbox.

Instant Internet Decoy' (https://decoys.me) creates convincing but entirely fictional people who have birthdays, locations in several countries, families and even answers to common security questions.

Another option is to create a mail alias - a different email address that is connected to your main mailbox. The advantages of this approach are that this email account will not expire, and if it gets compromised you can just dispose of it and create a new one. But beware that is very easy to check what the source email address, so don't use this method when you are trying to disguise your identity.

While not every mail service allows users to create mail aliases, this service is offered to every mail user of Riseup (https://we.riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org).

Commercial social networking platforms

Commercial social platforms are designed to collect and share as much information about you as possible so when crafting a separate identity, you need to take particular care to not reveal too much. There are some things to keep in mind:

  • Whatever social networking platform you decide to use, you should always read its terms of service to check if they suit your purposes. To get a summary of the terms of service of many social networking platforms (and other web services), go to the website Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (https://tosdr.org).
  • When creating an account for a new persona on a social networking platform, use the browser profile you have created for that persona. Make sure to check the privacy settings so that you know what you are making public, who can see what you post, who can contact you, who can look you up and what your contacts can do (can they tag you in pictures? can they write on your "wall"?)
  • Have fun with the profile information you provide but remember that this info is publicly available, so think about the message you want to convey with it.
  • Make sure your contacts do not overlap with your other identities, and your different identities don't "follow" one another. It is particularly not a good idea to follow your pseudonymous personas with your real identity. If someone is looking to unmask one of these personas, the first thing they will look for is who the account follows, and who follows the account. For the same reason, we should avoid reposting posts or other content published by one account with another account.
  • If you are using a GPS-enabled phone, Most social networking platforms will display your location where they can. This function is generally provided when you interact with the platform using a GPS-enabled phone, but the network your computer is connected to may also provide location data. It's always a good idea to double-check your settings - particularly on photo and video sharing sites.
  • If you access social networking platforms via mobile apps, it is better to use a different app for each separate account, so as not to post something to the wrong account by mistake. There are several apps which can be used to manage your social networking platforms - it is, however, a good idea to use a different one for each identity, to reduce the risk of giving away your real identity.
  • To make your identities look like different people, you can publish from your various accounts at different times of the day. Some social networking platforms, like Facebook, allow users to schedule the publication time of their posts. To learn how to do this, read: https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635. Buffer (https://buffer.com) and Postcron (https://postcron.com) enable you to schedule a post on Twitter and other platforms.
  • It can be a good idea to follow, from your pseudonymous profiles, other people who might reasonably be considered the real owners of that profile. To further distance your real identity from your pseudonymous identities, you can also write (and hashtag on Twitter) posts under your pseudonymous profiles about events that you are not attending, especially if they are taking place far away from you. It can also be fun to publish and then delete posts that look like you have exposed your identity, so as to further confuse anyone who may try to unmask you.

Alternative social platforms

Mainstream commercial social networking platforms can be extremely useful if your intention is to publicise as widely as possible an event you are organizing or a project you are launching. But they are not all that zen. They have very strict terms of service that could justify their decision to close your accounts if they find that your contents go against their rules (for more, read: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135175216204375.html). They also profile the users and send the information to advertisers. If you add to this the ever-changing terms of service and the interactions with other apps and features that make it very difficult to understand clearly what actually happens to your data.

So be strategic. Limit the use of commercial social networking platforms to specific projects you want to publicise to a wide audience. For other purposes, there are alternative social networking platforms that give much more freedom to their users and don't profile them. These are community-based, distributed rather than centralized, based on free and open-source software and privacy-friendly. Among these, Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com), Friendica (https://friendica.com), N-1 (https://n-1.cc/) and Crabgrass (https://we.riseup.net) are especially worth mentioning. Other similar sites may be popular in different regions, so you may wish to research them.

Before choosing to use a social networking platform, you should ask:

  • Does it provide connection over SSL (like HTTPS) for all uses of the site, rather than just during login? Are there any problems related to encryption (e.g. related to encryption certificates)?
  • According to the platform's End User Licence Agreement, Privacy Policy and/or Data Use Policy, how is your content and personal data treated? With whom are they shared?
  • What privacy options are provided for users? For example, can you choose to share your videos securely with a small number of individuals, or are they all public by default?
  • Is the geographical location of the servers known? Under which territorial jurisdiction do they fall? Where is the company registered? How does this information relate to the privacy and security of your activity and information?

Creating a blog or website

Creating a blog can be as easy as signing up to a blogging platform and choosing a name and a "theme" or visual template. There are several blogging platforms that are both user-friendly and free, including the open-source Wordpress (Wordpress.com). Based on the same software, but with some tweaks for additional user privacy, are two security-oriented platforms that are managed by autonomous servers: Autistici/Inventati’s (A/I) Noblogs (http://noblogs.org) and Nadir’s BlackBlogs – (http://blackblogs.org). To create a blog on either of these platforms, all that is needed is to have an email account hosted on an autonomous server (see https://www.autistici.org/en/links.html and https://blackblogs.org/policy respectively for a complete list).

If you want a complex graphic layout or need to install particular tools that are not offered by Wordpress and its plugins, you can create your own website. For this you need to get some space in a server through a webhosting service. There are many services out there, but since they generally aren’t free, the options to stay completely anonymous are reduced to creating a website with A/I, which by default does not connect the users of its services with real identities. To learn more about Autistici/Inventati’s webhosting service, visit: https://www.autistici.org/en/services/website.html

If you want to use your own domain name, bypassing payments and identifications may get difficult unless you use Bitcoin or another anonymous payment system. The personal data you will provide will not only be stored in the registrar’s internal archives, but by default will also be recorded in a database that can be easily queried by anybody through a simple command in a search engine (whois) or on several websites such as Gandi.net (https://www.gandi.net/whois). To avoid this, you can register your domain with the data of an association and use a prepaid credit card that is not connected to your own data (if available in your country). Alternatively, you can use a registrar like Gandi.net (https://www.gandi.net) that offers private domain registration for individuals whenever possible.

A different machine for each identity

There are three approaches to digital security: the first one is security by obscurity, which is based on encryption, strong passwords and similar measures and acts as a first line of defence, as a deterrent that will discourage random attacks but is not likely to stop someone who is directly targeting you; then there is security by correctness, whereby software developers try to get rid of bugs that make their code vulnerable. But modern software is very complex, and it is almost impossible to do this job perfectly. Therefore, one of the most realistic approaches is security by isolation, which gives for granted that security measures can be vulnerable and focuses on harm reduction by stopping possible attackers from accessing the whole system that needs to be secured.

If you use the same operating system for your several identities, no matter how carefully you separate your profiles you can still make a human mistake by, for example, connecting to a pseudonymous account through the browser profile you have assigned to your "real" identity, or get infected by a malware that allows your attacker to monitor everything you do online, with all your identities. Both risks can be limited by using a virtual machine for each of your domains, and by reserving yet another virtual machine to opening untrusted attachments in order to avoid a malware infection.

As the name suggests, a virtual machine (VM) is basically a simulated computer with its own operating system, which runs as software on your physical computer. You can think of a VM as a computer within a computer. Installing and running a virtual machine is not very complicated, and there is very good documentation around. For your purposes of anonymisation, the best available option is to install Virtualbox, an open-source, cross-platform virtual machine monitor (https://www.virtualbox.org). Using Virtualbox, you can create a virtual machine, and then run an operating system on it called Whonix.

Whonix

Whonix (https://www.whonix.org) is an operating system that aims at protecting your anonymity, privacy and security by helping you to use your applications anonymously. A web browser, IRC client, word processor and more come pre-configured with security in mind. Whonix is a complete operating system designed to be used in a virtual machine. It is also free software, based on Tor, Debian GNU/Linux and security by isolation. Whonix’s website offers a wide documentation: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation

Tails

Tails, or The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is a free and open-source Linux distribution that can be started on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card and forces all its outgoing connections to go through Tor, blocking direct, non-anonymous connections. When you launch Tails, you have a complete operating system that comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc. With Tails, you can access the internet, communicate, and do all you need anonymously and securely and, after the computer is shut down, the system will leave no traces on the machine unless you ask it to do so.

Qubes OS

Qubes OS (https://www.qubes-os.org) is a free and open-source security-oriented operating system based on Fedora, a GNU/Linux distribution, and Xen, a virtual machine monitor that allows us to separate the various parts of our digital life into securely isolated virtual machines. Qubes keeps the things you do on your computer securely isolated in these different VMs so that if one virtual machine gets compromised, the other won’t be affected. This way, you can do everything on a single physical computer without having to worry that one successful cyberattack harms your whole system, potentially revealing all the connections among your several identities.

What to choose

The three tools we have described – Tails, Whonix and Qubes OS – allow you to use a completely separate operating system for managing your alternate identities, and can be quite useful to make sure that you don’t reveal your true identity while you use the anonymous one(s).

Using Tails is pretty easy, and if what you need to do with your alternate persona needs a focus on anonymisation, then it may be worthwhile to overcome the initial obstacle of installing it in a USB stick and launching it. Tails is a good option also if we have few resources, if we don’t have a computer of our own, or if we often use computers at internet cafes and want to be safer. But if on the other hand we need persistence and we want to keep some files or actions we have created, we need to enable this option when we start the system. Tails is an established, respected project that has been developed for many years and is used by a wide community of people.

If what you need is both anonymity and security by isolation and you have a good machine where you can run Virtualbox (https://www.whonix.org/wiki/System_Requirements), installing Whonix seems a good solution that caters to all your needs and also offers an excellent documentation: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation. Nevertheless, Whonix, like Qubes Os, is a relatively recent project and the community using it is still rather small.

Qubes OS is a good choice if you want to keep all your activities inside your own computer without having to install anything else and if what you are trying to do is to effectively separate your identities rather than anonymise your activities in the web. It requires a very powerful computer – http://qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements – and this can be a hindrance, but if you feel that you really need to protect yourself against possible cyberattacks, the investment may be worth its while.

To sum up, none of these tools protect you from every threat, and you shouldn’t look at them as a magic potion that will make you invulnerable. Nevertheless, by using any of them, according to your needs and resources, you will raise the level of effort that an attacker will need to harm you, thus making an attack less likely. For a wider comparison among these and other systems, go to: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others

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