Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

Crafting an identity

Consider the data that many sites request on signup: name, location (possibly your exact address), date of birth, phone number etc. If protecting your identity is indeed important to you, consider what these values should be. If there’s never any adverse recourse from fabricating them then do just that – make them all up. Make sure you record them though as they may be required for identification purposes later on, for example your date of birth is requested as part of an account unlock process. Don’t put them in a text file on your desktop called “my secret online identity”, put them in an encrypted keychain such as 1Password’s.