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Comment by ephemeral9235 | Hacker News Reader

See this -^ ? It's a new pseudonymous account. Unless your social network has some kind of insane policy where they only allow you to have a single identity you can use that kind of feature to compartmentalize your activities.

Combine that with a phone that lets you have multiple users where you use one for banal activity which you can then show to Big Brother when he comes knocking. And others for anything important.

To me having several pseudonyms and also using throwaways is part of standard information hygiene. I also have multiple email addresses, some are set to forward to others (one-way of course), others aren't. I don't know why people aren't teaching that to their children.

I also love 4chan for that reason. I can talk to people in a totally ephemeral manner. Identity only exists for the duration of a conversation.

Or I don't know, do people also share their grindr adventures by linking that account to twitter these days?

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Let me start by saying I don't begrudge your info hygiene habits at all, this isn't an attack against you. But I've seen a few suggestions lately on building tools to circumvent these awful policies.

What we need to be doing is vehemently protesting these policies and rejecting them completely. If we start building tools to deny information when someone Has physical access to your unlocked device then we normalize these policies and accept the enevitibility that our privacy is gone. This is a war we cannot win. Not everyone is going to operate with the hygienic standards you use.

That said I've never actively protested a thing in my life. I am basically guilty or complicit myself, and I hate it.

If protesting these things worked, we'd never have border searches in the first place. Nobody wants to be searched.

Ultimately most people just simply do not place any value on their privacy.

thats not true, people simply don't understand how their privacy has been used against them. everyone still thinks this is about ads, but its much worse.

Yeah protesting hasn't really worked that well to date. But do you think people will become more upset if they're told that transiting through airports now requires you to hand over your unlocked phone to a stranger while they go through all of your email, banking, and social media accounts?

It's easy to dismiss data retention laws because they're so far away. But if someone is literally sitting across from you going through your phone? I think (hope) that image will drive the point home a lot better than it has previously.

> To me having several pseudonyms and also using throwaways is part of standard information hygiene. I also have multiple email addresses, some are set to forward to others (one-way of course), others aren't. I don't know why people aren't teaching that to their children.

For aliens (people entering under ESTA, visas, etc), you are compelled to reveal any aliases or pseudonyms you operate under. There's a two page document for you to fill the details out under ESTA, presumably under under a visa as well. Lying to a border guard, or on these forms is a felony.

That must be new. It wasn't part of esta two years ago. I would be totally unable to produce all my aliases in all the services I have accounts. I wouldn't even be able to remember all the services.

I believe it's supposed to be only names you've gone under, calling yourself horsemaster88 on youtube wouldn't be included, but calling yourself Jerry Fink, lord of horses would be included. With the new laws going into place for giving up social media names I wouldn't be surprised if online pseudonyms will be included in the future though.

That falls apart with the simplest IP tracking. The government has all that data anyway, I see no reason they couldn't run a "background check" and figure out exactly who you are and what you've done.

It's a false sense of security, is it not? It's probably best to assume your opponent isn't completely dumb.

That depends on what your threat model is. I assume we're talking about random police or border searches of your phone. Not the NSA or some surveillance apparatus which can make warrantless inquiries to your ISP and social network providers at a moments notice.

If we're facing a surveillance state without any internal obstructions then yes, far stricter opsec will be needed.

You're right of course.

I guess I'm wondering if border guards at any point in the future will have quick access to a database, presumably with information from a company that has either voluntarily or been forced to provide data.

Sir, we just ran your social networking accounts and according to our data you have another Facebook account that you did not provide access to...

Such a database would indicate two things a) law enforcement has access to such a database without warrants b) facebook provides such a database without warrants.

To me those would be reasons to leave the country and facebook.

A and b are both well established facts. You are, however, still allowed to leave both the country and Facebook without restriction. For now.

where have you been?

In the near future I expect random border searches to include all internet traffic associated with you. It's going to get hard for the average person to evade it. Your techniques won't be nearly enough.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/obama-administra...

If a state intelligence agency is targeting you, there's just really not a lot you can do at that point. But ephemeral9235's suggestions should work OK to avoid handing over all your personal data at the border.

Even something like a VPN isn't really perfect, because a smart enough monitoring system could track a vpn connection coming from your system, and then compare that to traffic coming from the vpn. Tricky, but possible.

Read the Snowden docs more closely, there's an express program for automatic identification of VPN traffic patterns.

Social networks are useless with pseudonimous accounts - unless there is some link between pseudonyms. The social aspect is in building the network, having reputation, maintaining a circle of friends and acquaintances, etc. but you can't build network out of throwaway accounts. Of course, HN is not a social network - it's a news/discussion site. So if you don't care about the reputation - which is not prominent anyway, so there's not much reason to care - you can use throwaways freely. But for most social networking functions it's a no go.

And ascribing too much importance to social network reputation leads to a great episode of Black Mirror, hardly a desirable world to live in though.

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