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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

I love to get a quote on the cost of disappearing. Maybe I'm not ready yet but it would be nice to hear my options so that I would have a clear plan should that option ever become necessary. Haha

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Don't do it ... there is another article floating around the internets about a guy who specializes in finding people who disappear. And apparently his successrate is well above 80% (from memory). Most people are just not that great at leaving their live behind and will leave traces by calling family or accessing old online accounts.

Would you happen to have a link? Google has become terrible useless for me for finding specific things based on few keywords.

I'm trying to find the link but I remember reading an article on HN about how nigh impossible it is to fake your own death. Not sure if that was what the parent was talking about. Here's one I found:

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of-inve...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20862618

There's a massive problem with false positive bias. If someone fakes their own death successfully, no one will ever know

For this reason it's always funny to me when people say "criminals are always caught in the end", "crime doesn't pay", etc. How would they know?

That's why you should hire one to check your work [1]

[1] http://archive.is/XCTZl

It's not hard if you take a few precautions and don't need to hide from people with determination and resources (that translates into a spider on social media that performs facial recognition on every photo it finds, so not even a country). Get a new nickname (and stop using all associated accounts, including email), move to a different city, drop your old phone number and get a new job. Don't contact anyone from your old life. You've disappeared. Only real nutcases will try to follow you and unless they're also technically inclined or rich they won't find you.

If you're trying to evade someone that's technically savvy you'll need to take steps to make sure you don't pop up on photos and perhaps adopt a different writing style.

For more advanced scenarios it just keeps escalating to more and more difficult measures to take. For most people the really extreme measures aren't necessary.

I think it’s more effective to just mass ghost people. The first step would probably be saying no to everything people come with. Couple that with being a dick in general and you should have the perfect recipe for peace. Well probably not emotional peace but YMMV.

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