In this interesting article from Andy Baio, titled “Think You Can Hide, Anonymous Blogger? Two Words: Google Analytics“, he mentions the following points to improve your anonymity when blogging when going dark:
- Don’t use Google Analytics or any other third-party embed system. If you have to, create a new account with an anonymous email. At the very least, create a separate Analytics account to track the new domain. (From the “My Analytics Accounts” dropdown, select “Create New Account.”)
- Turn on domain privacy with your registrar. Better, use a hosted service to avoid domain payments entirely.
- If you’re hosting your own blog, don’t share IP addresses with any of your existing websites. Ideally, use a completely different host; it’s easy to discover sites on neighboring IPs.
- Watch your history. Sites like Whois Source track your history of domain and nameserver changes permanently, and Archive.org may archive old versions of your site. Being the first person to follow your anonymous Twitter account or promote the link could also be a giveaway.
- Is your anonymity a life-or-death situation? Be aware that any service you use, including your own ISP, could be forced to reveal your IP address and account details under a court order. Use shared computers and an anonymous proxy or Tor when blogging to mask your IP address. Here’s a good guide.
These are all very valid points, yet the problem with these is that it inspires folk to dig further. Just because you try to be anonymous. And just because they can.
So the answer is: create confusion.
Simply by creating a fake identity. Not a Joe Doe one. Not one of these domainname masker things. No, they’d just cause suspicion. Just create a genuine sounding email address, matching a genuine sounding name: firstname.lastname@gmail (no fucking hotmail or yahoo), a snailmail address for the domainname reg (preferable an appartmentbuilding), an accompanying facebook account, some public posts on google+ and off you go. All this under the new identity, new address and email-address. To set this up.. will take you about what? 15 minutes?
And… the nice thing is: this new identity becomes googleable.
The only thing now really left are a) your home IP address (but IP that’s pretty ok, unless you do really nasty shit) and maybe: domainname payments. Which is also okay: as a webdeveloper you can pay for your clients (and setup different domain “whois” profiles for your clients).
If you have no inspiration for your new identity, just mix up the firstname and lastname of 2 previous old classmates of yours.
With this setup, nothing seems really suspicious. Let them do a whois. Or a IP lookup to see which are your IP neighbours. At worst, it turns out to be some guy with not-so-many Facebook friends (which is also circumventable if you turn off those settings).
Even better, and even more confusing, would probably be to hi-jack someone else’s online identity. With an almost-the-same gmail address. And name. But that’s probably illegal: so don’t do that shit.
All in all, you can mix these tips up with some of the masking techniques from Andy Baio, to really cause confusion. So that when they eventually finally figure out the masked name, it is only your fake online identity.
Confusion, a beautiful thing.
* Title inspired by BoingBoing
