Want your privacy back? Try disappearing

Earlier this year, a friend of mine (Alex) was part of the Wired "Disappear" contest that was tied in with the Repomen movie. She had to disappear for a month, all while doing one or two mandated tasks from Loneshark Games to give some clues to the people hunting her and three other "runners" down. With all the photos and videos the runners had taken during the course of the hunt, it would have made for a really fascinating read, but the writer left before the feature was finished, and the whole thing was boiled down to a rather lame blog post instead.

http://cs.condenastdigital.com/cs/wordpress/repomen/?p=2124

I've bugged her to write down her experience in some form, she traveled all over the country on a limited budget, and we pulled some pretty smooth tricks on the people chasing her (by the time one guy figured out I was a mole, none of the other hunters trusted him, and thought HE was the one leaking info to the runners), but she never got around to that.

Alex managed to elude people quite well, using me and one other friend as her sole contacts during the ordeal. I think we did a smashing job eluding everyone, and it was a really fascinating experience, even just from my position as the guy gathering and relaying intelligence and information. The other guy who beat the hunters was ex-Army, said we'd do well in the CIA, heh.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm really posting about is that even when you're forced to reveal aspects of your whereabouts online, it's not that hard to disappear. The hard part is not going crazy during the process. At first you're too paranoid, but if you get too comfortable, you'll start to give away clues to your past, and that will ultimately be your undoing. "Never look back" is so much harder than most people realize, especially in the long term.

I would love to believe that in the future, people are given more leeway for the way they behaved in their youth, given the way the internet never forgets. Everyone makes mistakes, but so many people are documenting each other now, things like that aren't forgotten the way they used to be.

The idea of completely shedding an old identity is pretty absurd, a short-term workaround at best.

I wish there was more explanation for the "never use a false identity" bullet point. Your real identity is out, surely? Does this mean avoid having to use an identity at all? What if you're forced? (pulled over, etc.)