Complete manual/223/en

There are various approaches to digital security, but one of the most realistic approaches is security by isolation, which assumes that all security measures have their holes and therefore focuses on harm reduction by preventing possible attackers from accessing the ‘whole system’ that needs to be secured. This is what underlies the strategy of using multiple online identities in isolation from each other—it takes a single target that is difficult to defend (your ‘real identity’) and turns it into multiple targets (your various online identities) —if done correctly—. It can be effective, but this all depends on your situation and the type and depth of security you are trying to create. Ultimately this depends on who you really think your "adversary" is and what kind of access you think they have. How you appear to outsiders online, is very different to how you appear to someone who has indirect access to you devices or the services you use. If you are working in an environment where you want greater control over your devices and services, one technique is to extend this strategy from separate and isolated online personas (and the online accounts you use them with to communicate with distinct social domains) to the devices you use. Most of us use the same operating system on the same device to create, use and manage all our online identities, since we usually only have access to one computer and one mobile phone. Because of the way we are uniquely ‘fingerprinted’ online via our browsers and apps (see for instance EFF’s Panopticlickː https://panopticlick.eff.org/), we have to take extra steps to ‘appear’ different when we use our different online identities. One of the ways we do this is by varying the browsers we use, and creating and saving separate browser profiles that we use for each online identity.