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how to manage web identity/anonymity?
Chaotic Descent
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm curious on methods of handling your online identity and anonymity.
I've always been rather paranoid about revealing personal information. I tend to only confide personal information when I have the safety of no one being able to match it to a real name. It gets complicated though if you try to confide to one group of people and then keep it separate from another group of people. Maybe you want to tell your online friends how your life is going, but not the other acquaintances in your online peer group.
Maybe you want to do pornographic art, but you don't want your friends in another group to be able to puzzle together that it's you. Maybe you want to do vanilla pornographic material under one name, and crazy BSDM material under another, so even the people that look at your vanilla porn don't know you're into kinky stuff. (just an example. everyone knows I'm into the shemales.
)
I was pretty dissapointed when I went on sites like MySpace and found you couldn't specify what information to show the public if you wanted to separate what the public and friends saw. Really primitive.
And those sites that keep track of your location really creep me out.
Some people are really blazé about their personal information. They put out videos blogging their life, and anyone can find out where they live. I think on one level that's not too bad an approach, but you don't share absolutely everything with absolutely everyone.
I just wish there was more customization. more matching. not that I have a lot of friends and acquaintances but I want people to be able to instantly with a single click have a list of all of things they share in common with me without having to read a list that includes things that they DON'T have in common with me.
and how about making relationships between those things? So maybe people who like Transformers for one reason will see that I like Transformers for the same reasons. and that those reasons are... artistic, so they're related to other artistic subjects. and people who share those unique connections between interests can find others like them.
I've always been rather paranoid about revealing personal information. I tend to only confide personal information when I have the safety of no one being able to match it to a real name. It gets complicated though if you try to confide to one group of people and then keep it separate from another group of people. Maybe you want to tell your online friends how your life is going, but not the other acquaintances in your online peer group.
Maybe you want to do pornographic art, but you don't want your friends in another group to be able to puzzle together that it's you. Maybe you want to do vanilla pornographic material under one name, and crazy BSDM material under another, so even the people that look at your vanilla porn don't know you're into kinky stuff. (just an example. everyone knows I'm into the shemales.
)I was pretty dissapointed when I went on sites like MySpace and found you couldn't specify what information to show the public if you wanted to separate what the public and friends saw. Really primitive.
And those sites that keep track of your location really creep me out.
Some people are really blazé about their personal information. They put out videos blogging their life, and anyone can find out where they live. I think on one level that's not too bad an approach, but you don't share absolutely everything with absolutely everyone.
I just wish there was more customization. more matching. not that I have a lot of friends and acquaintances but I want people to be able to instantly with a single click have a list of all of things they share in common with me without having to read a list that includes things that they DON'T have in common with me.
and how about making relationships between those things? So maybe people who like Transformers for one reason will see that I like Transformers for the same reasons. and that those reasons are... artistic, so they're related to other artistic subjects. and people who share those unique connections between interests can find others like them.
Chaotic Descent on
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If you're on *nix, just add an account (useradd blah) and log on to another graphical terminal with it.
If you're worried about the security and honesty of the admins of the sites you use, you would need to use a good proxy. Those can be hard to find.
This only covers seperate identities, though. Using the same identity for multiple...demographics is probably impossible.
eh... I think there's still a lot missing. I remember realizing when I tried to make an alternate identity that I ended up leaking connections to other online names I used. I mean... how the hell do you manage that?? What, do I gotta practice my made-up life story and make sure it covers every aspect of my life? isn't there a more reasonable approach?
and then I realize I made a bad judgement and something I wanted to share in one group is shared in a different group, but for the sake of integrity I can never change things.
There is a more reasonable approach - just use your real name, real information, and don't put out anything you don't feel fine having everybody on Earth know about. Some people prefer pseudonyms, but that tends to give a false sense of security (as you've discovered).
If you want to do something online and don't want people to find out, your best chance is to create another identity for only that. In your example of creating porn, you'd use a random identity generator, and then never ever ever do anything in real life related to it. No pictures of yourself, no pictures of your room, no showing up at conventions, nothing at all. Don't give your fake identity a life story, it doesn't need one. Use Tor to prevent IP tracing, run your web browsers in a virtual machine with a different operating system and browser than you'd otherwise use, and don't use that VM for browsing any sites besides your porn thing. Depending on what your personal life is like, you might have to use anything from hidden files to encrypted partitions.
In my opinion, it's just too much trouble to maintain an online identity in any meaningful sense, even as minimal as one dedicated to one facet of yourself. I (luckily) don't have to, but if you've got something to hide, start acting like your life depends on keeping it hidden. Anything less is insufficient.
How do you encrypt against your ISP?
Let's say I'm downloading 300gigabytes a month, are there ways to encrypt where you are actually getting stuff from without your ISP knowing without a proxy, and is it legal?
Also, if you're going to do porn, as long as you don't show your face I doubt anyone will be able to know it's you unless you have some distinguishing features, like scars and birthmarks or tatoos and shit.
Although it should be added that no-one at an ISP is able to monitor this with the exception of their NOC team, and to be honest, they don't care.
Yes but those record are sitting there ready for any Men in Black (or people posing as the Men in Black) to take away.
Numerous companies offer subscription based services to provide anonymity, the example I will use Xerobank where you are given access to an encrypted private network which has access to the interent.
Other methods of encrypting without a proxy (per se) are using Tor to encrypt the connection between a Tor node and your self so that your ISP cannot read it.
And remeber children Google is your friend.
SSH. But I guess that only kind of works, since I'm pretty sure everyone can see who you connect to, just not what is transmitted.
I meant for just browsing web pages.
I think he means SSL. But no, if you connect, certain bits of information must fly back and forth (IP and port at a minimum). Even if you use a proxy, it'll still be in your ISP's logs.
Card numbers are generated with an algorithm, apparently, so the number may be valid, but it won't work for actual payments unless all other details are correct.
Another point is that ANY local file encryption is breakable, it is just a case of how long it takes to get at the information, TrueCrypt for instance has a method of encryption where the data is encrypted with a large 448bit key that means that there are
2 to the power of 448 = 726838724295607000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
possible key combinations to unlock the data that can be cycled through, but going through all these combinations is just a matter of time and the time is shortening with newer and faster processors.
Online it is different as the data is obsolete by the time the encryption is broken but this is not so for local encryption
SSH can be used to browse web pages, using it with a Linux based OS could allow websites to be downloaded with wget (built into most Linux distros) to download the webpage, not particularly elegent but it would get the job done.
Your IP would still be going to the server with no encryption, otherwise the packets couldn't be routed.
And how would you access websites using SSH? I've never encountered a SSH using website. SSL for sure, but if they're going to support any sort of encryption they might as well go with the more elegant and purpose-built SSL.
I believe this article explains it:
http://jstrassburg.blogspot.com/2006/01/howto-tunneling-http-over-ssh-with-dd.html
That depends on having control over the source and destination. The IP is still sent (no way around this short of using a proxy, and your ISP still has the real IP logged, and you rely on the log release policy of the proxy being very restrictive), and you still need to encrypt the connection coming from the SSH tunnel to the website.
Workstation->SSH proxy at your house is secure, but proxy->website is not. The IP still has to go to the remote server. Unless you hack someone's router and make it look like the packets come from them (probably illegal), you're still sending your personally identifiable IP to the remote server so they can send data back to you.
There's this misconception that using a dynamic DNS somehow makes you anonymous, but your IP is still going to be used.
I would go in to details on why this won't work, but it would require going in to a level of detail that goes way beyond the scope of this H&A thread. Short of creating your own internet with encryptable routing protocols and controlling every hop, there is no way to have perfect privacy on the internet without defeating the point of using the internet.