Complete manual

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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 shadow is the story that data tell about you. It is created by trillions of traces, or bits of data, left behind in the digital world every time you go online, or when your mobile phone or any other object around you sends information to the 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 publishing and sharing information about yourself 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.

In order to understand the concept of digital shadows, it is useful to break it down into what the data is that is being collected and who is collecting it.

What is data?

When we think about digital traces, we are talking about three types of data: content, metadata and noise.

Content: is what you actively produce: your messages, blogs, tweets, phone calls and online purchases; the pictures and videos you take to remember.

Metadata: is data about your data, information that is needed for the technological infrastructure to work. It enables your email to be delivered, files on your computer to be found and mobile communication to work. If you take the example of an email that you send, the metadata includes the sender's email, the recipient's email, the time the email was sent, the type of device the email was sent from, and the location it was sent from.

Noise: is the data that is created by either the manufacturing process or by the workings of the technological infrastructure. For example, every camera with a SD card to record and store pictures has unique scratches. These make small changes to the data that are not visible to the eye but can be recognised by computers.

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 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 by people who want to harm your reputation or attack you for your views or beliefs. All of the aforementioned actors can have access to your digital shadow. They might access it in different ways: through surveillance of your activities, through data-sharing between applications, or through researching publicly available pieces of data about you and patching these all together.

Depending on who you are and what you do, you will probably have different concerns about who can access your digital shadows and how this makes you vulnerable.


Exploring

You can't know exactly what is happening to your digital shadow or who might have to access to it, and that itself is a problem. Although this situation might seem dire, the idea is not to get paralyzed by paranoia but to try to demystify it for yourself and 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, depth and characteristics of your digital shadow:

  • Trace My Shadow (https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow) is a tool produced by Tactical Tech that allows you to see some of the traces you are leaving online, and it offers a lot of tips on how to protect your privacy.
  • Digital Shadow (https://digitalshadow.com) is a Facebook app developed by Ubisoft which illustrates what third parties can know about you through your Facebook profile.
  • Panopticlick (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. By using this application, your browser will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.
  • OpenPaths.cc (https://openpaths.cc/) is a tool that allows you to track your location history over time with your smartphone. You can then visualise this data and see what kind of story it tells about you.

Self-doxing: Another strategy for exploring your visible traces and what is already out there about you on the internet is to dox yourself. Doxing describes tracing or gathering information about someone using sources that are freely available on the internet. 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. This technique is used sometimes by activists and investigative journalists to profile subjects of interest. It is also used as a strategy of harassment online. "Self-doxing", or researching yourself, is a technique that can help you to make informed decisions about what you 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" (through websites such as: http://www.whois-search.com/ or similar). For more ideas on how to self-dox yourself (or to dox someone else), there are two helpful links from Lilith Lela (https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=93870) and one posted on Modal View Culture(https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gathering-information-to-assess-risk)

Remember, even while you are exploring yourself, other people can be exploring you too. So when you are using these web services and looking for your digital shadow, a good idea is to use anonymisation tools like Torbrowser(https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en).

Mapping

While we have explained what steps you might take to explore your personal digital shadow and traces you leave online, you will also need to enlarge this exploration to the people you interact with online.

Everyone belongs to several social domains - your work or advocacy networks, your family networks, friends, sports teams, whatever. Some networks may feel safer than others. For example, you may be more vigilant about what you share and how you share it in your work or advocacy activities, but less so 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. 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. You can do this by considering the data that you handle in the different realms of your life and ask yourself: what would happen if this particular data suddenly disappeared or if it was seen, copied and distributed by a third actor party?

Example: Polish computer security researcher Joanna Rutkowska 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.

This might be a technical example, but it illustrates the concept of security by isolation very well as it recognises that security measures can always be vulnerable and that harm can be reduced by stopping possible attackers from accessing the whole system that needs to be secured. This example can be applied in other ways to your own social domains.

Controlling

Finding out what data exists out there and can be accessed by others is an empowering first step. There are also measures you can take to control what content and metadata you give away. When you publish content on the internet, 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 steps, you can limit your risks. You can think of these as increasing the amount of effort someone who wants to surveil or attack you or your contacts would need to take.

Controlling your content when connecting to the internet

  • When giving personal information to a web service, make sure the service provides an encrypted connection for you to access it from (the url should begin with https://). You can use the browser add-on Https Everywhere for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers, provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help you force https connections with websites that have them (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere).
  • You can install add-ons like Privacy Badger or Adblock Plus for the Firefox Browser, as well as by monitoring your privacy settings and deleting cookies on a regular basis.

Controlling your content when publishing online

  • 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 networking platforms, 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 online, 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.

Reducing your metadata:

  • You can switch off the GPS tracker in your phone or camera.
  • When registering a device or software such as Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others, you don't need to use your real name. This prevents the metadata created when using this device or software from being connected to you.
  • 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.
  • You can use tools to remove metadata from certain files. For images there is Metanull for Windows (https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-africa/metanull/windows). For PDFs, 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. (Note: this tool 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.) For a full guide toremoving metadata from different file formats, see Tactical Tech's resource: https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-mena/remove-metadata.

Controlling your content by deleting accounts

One method of controlling your shadow is reducing the number of platforms and services you can be found on. Some tools to help you delete existing accounts include:

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.

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 situation the following questions:

  • Would my safety, job or livelihood 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?

These questions are part of a basic risk assessment which can you use at many different points when thinking about your digital security and privacy. Once you have assessed your risk, you can then consider different strategies for separating your identities online. These range from full transparency to full anonymity.

Further reading:

"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.

For instance the project Geek Wiki Feminism reveals how certain groups of people are disadvantaged by policies which require individuals to use their real or legal names. These include women, queers, trans* persons, differently-abled persons, children and parents. The costs to these groups when having a public profile attached to their real name can range from discrimination in employment or provision of services to arrest,imprisonment or execution in some jurisdictions. For a comprehensive list of which groups of people are affected and how they are affected see Geek Wiki Feminism (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

Further reading:

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.

Further reading:

Persistent Pseudonymity

Persistent pseudonymity involves a fictitious name used consistently over a period of time. In the age of the internet, a pseudonym may also be referred to as a "nickname" or "handle". There are myriad reasons why you might want to use a name other than the one you were born with such as to hide your gender or protect your privacy.

A pseudonym can be name-shaped (e.g., "Jane Doe") or not. At the time of writing, some websites - including Facebook - require that users use their "authentic identity" 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 among which we find feminists groups, trans* persons and drag kings and queens known for their pseudonymous rather than their legal name. If you choose to use a pseudonym on social networks, it is important to understand that you can be reported for using a "fake name" and possibly have your account deleted. A strategy for avoiding that is using a name-shaped pseudonym.

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.

Further reading:

Collective Identity

Another way to be anonymous is through collective participation. 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.

Some examples of collective identities: Captain Swing: the identity used by farm workers in their letters of protest during the English Swing Riots in 1830 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Swing)

Guerrilla Girls: an anonymous group of feminist and female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world (http://guerrillagirls.com/)

Luther Blisset: a name originally belonging to an Italian footballer which was adopted and used by many artists and activists for various actions and projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_%28nom_de_plume%29)

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 networking platforms and web services may be enough to protect yourself, but remember that 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. Take into account the following recommendations when creating new online identities:

  • 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 if possible, 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, or using a persistent pseudonymous when creating a one time use disposable email.
  • Creating disposable extra identities can be useful, as they can be discarded easily if compromised. Those can also 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.

What’s in a name ?

Many platforms have "real name" policies so if you want to use commercial social networking platforms, it is better to use a credible name and surname rather than more imaginative ones.

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 - 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 or if your activities might put them at risk!

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.

Further reading:

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 link 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.
  • Psychological attitude: A good way to give your persona depth is by creating some "weak spots" which are not the same as your own. So when the persona gets attacked, you can laugh about it and not experience harm. E.g if you have a good sense of humour, try impersonating a humourless person!
  • 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.

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.

Relevant links:

Managing several identities

Maintaining multiple identities is some work, but like most of these practices, it just requires some curiosity, 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 (but do think carefully about where you host or keep those notes!) There are also technical things you can do:

  • Create different browser profiles so that your browsing habits are captured under different identities, on Firefox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles) or Google Chrome (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824)
  • When creating a new email account or social media account for your identity, 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.
  • If you have the resources and motivation you can separate your identities per device or operating system. This can include using virtual machines for instance, as explained below.

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 other 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 minimise the amount of spam in your life. Below are some services which can help you set up these disposable accounts and addresses:

Anonbox:(https://anonbox.net) is a service provided by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) gives you a mailbox for a day.

Guerilla Mail: (https://www.guerrillamail.com) lets you choose your email id and holds any mail you receive to it in a mailbox for one hour.

BugMeNot: (http://bugmenot.com) allows people to share their email logins and passwords created for platforms with free registration, for anyone to use.

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 set up 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 really need 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).

Relevant links:

Commercial social networking platforms

Before choosing to use any social networking platform there are some basic security and privacy questions you should ask, regardless of which identity you plan on using:

  • Does it provide an encrypted connection (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?

Now when you think about crafting a separate identity and letting it out on commercial social networking platforms, there are additional precautions to take:

  • When creating a social networking account for a new persona, 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 information 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Relevant links:

  • Terms of Service; Didn’t Read: (https://tosdr.org) provides a summary in "human language" of the Terms of Service of many popular social networking platforms and other websites.

Alternative social networking 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. You can think of them as a megaphone - a great tool for getting attention and drawing a crowd but not ideal for communicating anything sensitive or private. There are numerous reasons why they are not considered security or privacy conscious. To begin 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. 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.

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 definitely have their downsides. 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. Examples include:

Diaspora: (https://joindiaspora.com) offers a community driven micro-tweeting platform Friendica: (https://friendica.com) enables users to integrate their contacts from different social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Diaspora, GNU social, App.net, Pump.io, etc), N-1: (https://n-1.cc/) offers a wide range of tools such as wiki, pads, mailing lists and has a clear anti-sexist terms of service Crabgrass: (https://we.riseup.net) has been around for more than ten years and constitute a solid and sustainable social networking alternative.

There may be similar sites popular in different regions, so you may wish to research them.

Relevant links:

Blogs and websites

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:

Wordpress: (https://wordpress.org) very popular and easy to use, open-source.

Noblogs: (http://noblogs.org) security-oriented blogging platform based on Wordpress with some tweaks for additional user privacy, managed autonomous servers, Austistici/Inventati.

BlackBlogs: (http://blackblogs.org) similar to Noblogs, managed by German tech collective, Nadir.

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 Austistici/Inventati, 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 (e.g: 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 (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.

To mitigate these risks, you could set up a different device for each of your domains but most of us don't have those kind of resources. A more feasible option is to set up a virtual machine (VM) which can be described as 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. This strategy can be useful for anonymisation but also for sharing machines with others or for example for opening untrusted attachments in isolation in order to avoid a malware infection of your entire system.

The three tools proposed here – Tails, Whonix and Qubes OS – provide you with virtual machines 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). Take into account that all the solutions detailed below are free and open-source Linux distributions and that they have been designed to maximise the privacy and security of its users.

Tails, or The Amnesic Incognito Live System: (https://tails.boum.org/) 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. Using Tails is pretty easy, and if what you want to do with your virtual identity needs anonymisation, then it may be worthwhile to overcome the initial obstacle of installing it on a USB stick and launching it. Tails is a good option also if you have few resources, if you don’t have a computer of your own, or if you often use computers at internet cafes and want to be safer. But if on the other hand you need persistence and you want to keep some files or actions you have created, you need to enable this option when you 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.

Whonix: (https://www.whonix.org) is an operating system designed to protect 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 relatively recent project and the community using it is still rather small. * System requirements: You will need a good machine where you can run Virtualbox (https://www.virtualbox.org) in order to install Whonix (https://www.whonix.org/wiki/System_Requirements). * Documentation: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation

Qubes: (https://www.qubes-os.org) keeps the things you do on your computer securely isolated in these different virtual machines so that if one VM 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. 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 online.

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.

Relevant links:

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