I lie all the time online on my pseudonym accounts to obscure things. But also because it's fun to lie about personal things (opinions, career, etc) .. especially when you're trying to win an argument haha
Of course. This was the encouraged behavior in the early 2k. There were little PSA's about it online. You never put your real info online, because there are crazy people out there that will use it.
I've tried to explain to friends and family that they shouldn't put their first, middle, and last name, all employment info, city, state, etc in their social media bio, and use the same headshot in all their accounts, but they seem to think the sociability/sanity filter that exists in their immediate circle somehow applies to the entire population on the internet.
The fact that you shouldn't use your real info online is clear to many. That being said, is it better to leave the fields empty, call yourself "anon," or create an imaginary online persona with inaccurate data to throw OSINT investigators off?
Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public. Free speech requires anonymity and pseudonymity to remain a possibility, but most humans are just fine with a single all-purpose identity.
Yet you'll find exactly nobody walking around, in public, with all of this information on their shirt. People seem to treat the internet as safer than real life public.
It is common to find all of those in real life "forums", like conferences and meetups: name and company on the badge are very common, and rough location is typically easily deducible.
This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the social graph, through photos, through interests, etc.
Your best defense is to use stable identities only for the things where keeping a historical record of your interactions is important to you. So sure, your GitHub portfolio (in the pre-LLM era, I guess), your research papers, maybe LinkedIn. But political flame wars on Reddit? Change accounts and delete comments aggressively, the only value of keeping it around is helping the bad guys.
I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop.
I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.
No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.
Noisy signals about tech literate people is still a signal. If only few experts are planting fake data about themselves, companies can cordon you off and spend more resources in deanonymizing you. By muddying the water, you are planting a target on yourself if many others aren't doing it.
Actually, noise is the opposite of signal. Data harvesting companies hate noise because strong signals are profitable. It's why Google successfully pushed for people to use their real identities online initially through Google Plus and why they also displayed such an unprecedented backlash against the AdNauseum browser extension after it came out
I always have my birthday, age, etc slightly off if possible for instance. I don’t claim to be 130 or something ridiculous. It’s all believable, near-accurate but not too near stuff for me.
Even comments on forums. I lie (in ways that don’t matter/deceive the people being talked to). I lie about my age, my family makeup, etc. when the info is relevant but doesn’t need to be specific. Example: if I’m 40, I’ll say I’m 43 (or in my mid-40’s or some other general statement) if being in that age range is what matters. If being 40 is what matters, well…I likely don’t need to comment badly enough to give that away.
I had the good sense to use a fake name long ago when I first signed up for facebook. A handful of my friends did the same. Over the years it has paid off in terms of people I don't know not being able to look me up. I'm also lucky to have a very common name. I am very un-googlable unless you know actual details about my professional life, in which case you can learn a bit more about what I do for work, but nothing else.
I also have a secondary facebook account with my real name whose "friends" are only random acquaintances who have bothered trying to connect with me over the years. I have used this in the past when potential employers, or border guards, have asked about my online presence.
I've been online since I was young and deep dark secrets about me are contained and findable on old forum databases and fragments of lost proto-social networks. I might be over-confident, but I'm almost sure not even palantir knows.
All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style.
I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else in the world has her name, so very googleable. I love the anonymity of my common name and she loves the unique identifier that is hers.
>All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style.
I don't think this is true for most people. Unless you are a relatively prolific (probably top 1% or even 0.1% or less), you likely do not have enough long form writing online to create a unique style fingerprint. All of your accounts will be consistent with having been written by the same person, but absent other information, will not be enough on their own to say that they were written by one and only one person.
And even for people who do have enough writing online to create a truly unique fingerprint, that fingerprint will not be universally applicable to all their accounts (at least not solely by writing style*). Even when you have a truly unique profile for someones writing style, a given writing sample needs to be greater than some minimum length in order to consistently match it.
Linking literally all of your online accounts will probably use writing style as a factor, but I very much doubt it will ever be enough on it's own.
You don't need much long-form writing for your idiolect to be identifiable. I recently returned to Reddit after a break and see that people generally don't write very long comments now, except for the autistic and others who can't follow social cues. But I already noticed that my short comments occasionally use turns of phrase that are fairly peculiar to me. Should be possible for a social media giant or nation-scale actor to deanonymize me. And some people give themselves away by outright posting in country or city subreddits.
The worst of both worlds is that you share a less common name with someone notorious for some reason, perhaps in the same city. Happened to someone I knew in grad school and they got literal death threats on their phone, number of which was in the phone book.
I find that at least for the goofy “look up anyone and brace yourself” data hoovering companies having a super common name means my info gets muddled in with a ton of other people’s.
Everyone legally change their name to the current most common name.
Nah, Smith stands out because everybody knows it's common. Cooper is better. It's one of the 10 most common last names in the US, but it doesn't give off "super common, might be fake" vibes.
I got myself a Pulitzer Prize, which helps a lot. Well ok, the guy who shares my name and writes terrible books managed to get himself a prize, but it really helps with hiding myself in searches. Well that and the Florida man who also shares my name who caught charges for terrible things :(
I remember the distinctly mixed feelings I got in the late 90s to early 2000s watching a search of my real name go from nothing but me, to mostly me, to "hey I'm still in the top 10", to not even on the front page depending on what search engine you use. (I still see myself on Google's front page, but not Bing's. Bing suggests that if I want more information on my real name I should postfix it with the word "fired", so, hey, I guess things could be worse because that's not me....)
Depends. Does that include making questionable Google searches about hundreds of different crime plots so that government handlers get super confused later on down the line?
Gotta make at least one-bank-heist-search a month.
As a Texan, minority owned business living in alaska using a VPN via the artic circle through the EU GDPR, I think everyone should be their authentic self.
I lie all the time online on my pseudonym accounts to obscure things. But also because it's fun to lie about personal things (opinions, career, etc) .. especially when you're trying to win an argument haha
Of course. This was the encouraged behavior in the early 2k. There were little PSA's about it online. You never put your real info online, because there are crazy people out there that will use it.
I've tried to explain to friends and family that they shouldn't put their first, middle, and last name, all employment info, city, state, etc in their social media bio, and use the same headshot in all their accounts, but they seem to think the sociability/sanity filter that exists in their immediate circle somehow applies to the entire population on the internet.
The fact that you shouldn't use your real info online is clear to many. That being said, is it better to leave the fields empty, call yourself "anon," or create an imaginary online persona with inaccurate data to throw OSINT investigators off?
Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public. Free speech requires anonymity and pseudonymity to remain a possibility, but most humans are just fine with a single all-purpose identity.
> Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public.
Yet you'll find exactly nobody walking around, in public, with all of this information on their shirt. People seem to treat the internet as safer than real life public.
It is common to find all of those in real life "forums", like conferences and meetups: name and company on the badge are very common, and rough location is typically easily deducible.
Crazy people, like Amazon, and Google, and the RNC and DNC think tanks. To maximize the extraction of value from your life, of course. Enjoy the ride.
This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the social graph, through photos, through interests, etc.
Your best defense is to use stable identities only for the things where keeping a historical record of your interactions is important to you. So sure, your GitHub portfolio (in the pre-LLM era, I guess), your research papers, maybe LinkedIn. But political flame wars on Reddit? Change accounts and delete comments aggressively, the only value of keeping it around is helping the bad guys.
I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop.
I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.
No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.
Derek Sivers is of the opinion that a fake persona is better than not sharing any details [1]:
> Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions.
1: https://sive.rs/anon
Noisy signals about tech literate people is still a signal. If only few experts are planting fake data about themselves, companies can cordon you off and spend more resources in deanonymizing you. By muddying the water, you are planting a target on yourself if many others aren't doing it.
Actually, noise is the opposite of signal. Data harvesting companies hate noise because strong signals are profitable. It's why Google successfully pushed for people to use their real identities online initially through Google Plus and why they also displayed such an unprecedented backlash against the AdNauseum browser extension after it came out
Depends on the details IMO.
I always have my birthday, age, etc slightly off if possible for instance. I don’t claim to be 130 or something ridiculous. It’s all believable, near-accurate but not too near stuff for me.
Even comments on forums. I lie (in ways that don’t matter/deceive the people being talked to). I lie about my age, my family makeup, etc. when the info is relevant but doesn’t need to be specific. Example: if I’m 40, I’ll say I’m 43 (or in my mid-40’s or some other general statement) if being in that age range is what matters. If being 40 is what matters, well…I likely don’t need to comment badly enough to give that away.
In my experience as a former astronaut, international spy, and traveler to half the countries in the world, the jury is still out.
You too? There’s so many of us I think we’re already lost in the crowd.
I had the good sense to use a fake name long ago when I first signed up for facebook. A handful of my friends did the same. Over the years it has paid off in terms of people I don't know not being able to look me up. I'm also lucky to have a very common name. I am very un-googlable unless you know actual details about my professional life, in which case you can learn a bit more about what I do for work, but nothing else.
I also have a secondary facebook account with my real name whose "friends" are only random acquaintances who have bothered trying to connect with me over the years. I have used this in the past when potential employers, or border guards, have asked about my online presence.
I've been online since I was young and deep dark secrets about me are contained and findable on old forum databases and fragments of lost proto-social networks. I might be over-confident, but I'm almost sure not even palantir knows.
All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style.
I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else in the world has her name, so very googleable. I love the anonymity of my common name and she loves the unique identifier that is hers.
>All our accounts will eventually be linked by our writing style.
I don't think this is true for most people. Unless you are a relatively prolific (probably top 1% or even 0.1% or less), you likely do not have enough long form writing online to create a unique style fingerprint. All of your accounts will be consistent with having been written by the same person, but absent other information, will not be enough on their own to say that they were written by one and only one person.
And even for people who do have enough writing online to create a truly unique fingerprint, that fingerprint will not be universally applicable to all their accounts (at least not solely by writing style*). Even when you have a truly unique profile for someones writing style, a given writing sample needs to be greater than some minimum length in order to consistently match it.
Linking literally all of your online accounts will probably use writing style as a factor, but I very much doubt it will ever be enough on it's own.
You don't need much long-form writing for your idiolect to be identifiable. I recently returned to Reddit after a break and see that people generally don't write very long comments now, except for the autistic and others who can't follow social cues. But I already noticed that my short comments occasionally use turns of phrase that are fairly peculiar to me. Should be possible for a social media giant or nation-scale actor to deanonymize me. And some people give themselves away by outright posting in country or city subreddits.
The worst of both worlds is that you share a less common name with someone notorious for some reason, perhaps in the same city. Happened to someone I knew in grad school and they got literal death threats on their phone, number of which was in the phone book.
I find that at least for the goofy “look up anyone and brace yourself” data hoovering companies having a super common name means my info gets muddled in with a ton of other people’s.
Everyone legally change their name to the current most common name.
Being named John Smith is such an underappreciated superpower.
Nah, Smith stands out because everybody knows it's common. Cooper is better. It's one of the 10 most common last names in the US, but it doesn't give off "super common, might be fake" vibes.
Where are some good places to plant false data?
Insanely attractive people follow me around constantly and I need some more privacy.
I got myself a Pulitzer Prize, which helps a lot. Well ok, the guy who shares my name and writes terrible books managed to get himself a prize, but it really helps with hiding myself in searches. Well that and the Florida man who also shares my name who caught charges for terrible things :(
I remember the distinctly mixed feelings I got in the late 90s to early 2000s watching a search of my real name go from nothing but me, to mostly me, to "hey I'm still in the top 10", to not even on the front page depending on what search engine you use. (I still see myself on Google's front page, but not Bing's. Bing suggests that if I want more information on my real name I should postfix it with the word "fired", so, hey, I guess things could be worse because that's not me....)
This article reminded me of seeing this in GH trending repositories last month: https://github.com/soxoj/maigret
"For educational and lawful purposes only"
I had to quit Large Penis Club, the parking lots were too small for my automobile.
Depends. Does that include making questionable Google searches about hundreds of different crime plots so that government handlers get super confused later on down the line?
Gotta make at least one-bank-heist-search a month.
Prolific AI blog giving advice about not trying to deceive AI so that AI gets the most pristine and valuable information.
As a Texan, minority owned business living in alaska using a VPN via the artic circle through the EU GDPR, I think everyone should be their authentic self.
yes.