Comment by Darkphibre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Darkphibre | Hacker News Reader

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Ooof, yeah. I was trying to make a new, purely anonymized identity. Went through an anonymized bitcoin VPN with TOR on top. Registered an email through Protonmail.

Pretty much no social media platform will accept Protonmail as an address without also having a phone number.

Got banned from Discord within 3 hours, literally all I'd done was send three friend requests and join one discord. My IP was rotating and I then needed to have 2-factor authentication (and protonmail wasn't allowed, I needed that phone number).

So, I went out and bought a burner phone, cash, with a 1-year prepaid account. Got it setup over a wired proxy with all radios turned off. Now at least I had a Google account! (they also require a phone number)

And Discord proceeded to reject it, because I needed to have a 'real' phone number from a major carrier.

I essentially needed to craft an entirely new identity if I wanted to be truly anonymous. It was eye-opening how invasive and pervasive the 'track you down to a real identity' accounts have become.

And even if you can get through all this, you might eventually get locked out anyway and get told to submit a photo of your government identification.

What websites ask for that?

I know Twitter does this. Also saw someone mention Facebook asked for the same when they tried to delete their account. It's a mad mad world out there.

That might be consequence if GDPR: they need legal proof of the legitimacy of the request and of its thorough execution.

Just as you can’t really “unsee”, you can’t fully delete data once you’re exposed to it. Something documenting its previous existence will always remain

Facebook for sure. I don't know about the others.

I had to create a FB account for college, and somehow my account was suspicious according to them. They locked it and said that I needed to provide a picture of my national ID in order to unlock it.

I was baffled and just created another account to be honest.

Linkedin

How did you get Bitcoin anonymously? It seems very difficult at least for US citizens.

Great question! I've heard that in-person cash exchange is your best bet, if you're wanting to be completely off the grid. There are services out there that can help with the exchange (early in Bitcoin, there was an escrow service in which you deposited cash into a savings account through an ATM, and an anonymous wallet would be credited with the appropriate Bitcoin). Not sure where that stands now.

Oh! But to your question: Mullvad VPN seems to be highly regarded, and has an option to configure a recurring payment that they (claim to) decouple from your identity. Their service even supports defining multi-hop routes.

And to be clear: My goal is to obfuscate my identity from malicious individuals (think: politician that wants to be kinky, but has to resort to online interactions during COVID lockdown, and wants to avoid both simple tracert IP identification as well as a potential password breach & leak of social media platform X). Hiding my identity from governments is not my goal, so trusting Mullvad was an acceptable risk assessment. I'd add additional layers if I wanted to be more anonymous.

My next step, when I get around to it, is to try to track down a cheap anonymous virtual host to SSL into... then at least I'll have a static IP. But I'd still be up a creek if they ever wanted to do two factor for some reason.

You can buy Monero instead, and funnel it through xmr.to to pay in Bitcoins. Another alternative might be fixedfloat.com. Tested both, but you had better not exchange big amounts.

Did you drive 6 hours to a different city and wear a costume to buy the burner?

Hmm, no. I'm primarily interested in obfuscating easy-to-acquire identification. I'm not interested in avoiding law enforcement.

But, if you are a citizen in a country that would employ law enforcement against you due to your minority status, I might encourage that protocol.

Sorry to say, but if you act like someone you aren't, you are not going to be welcome at websites that want to know they are responding to a real person.

Basically you are acting like you have something to hide which typically is something that people up to no good would do. I'm not saying you are up to no good, but your activity mirrors as such.

It's just unfortunate that companies are employing precog future-crime concepts to what (should) be standard privacy approaches.

And, to be clear, I'm not acting like someone I'm not. I'm forthcoming that I have an identity, and I'm even willing to prove that I'm a self-consistent individual. I'm acting like someone that has purchased a month-to-month phone, and have signed up for a free email account, and values their internet privacy. It's become apparent to me that a number of companies discriminate against people for whom this is their only choice... heaven help you if you can't afford a proper phone (or don't have the credit to open a proper cellphone account).

As a transgendered person that's been discriminated against, I do indeed have valid reasons for wanting my most personal conversations to be secure from being used against me. There are other aspects of my private life that that would be wildly misinterpreted if taken out of context. I would prefer to keep my private life wholly separate from my public persona, and that's... harder to do in the age of COVID isolation where everything is online.

It's astonishing to me how many people just... don't care about their privacy these days. And that the bar is so crazy high to be anonymous. To the point that wanting to be anonymous for a few hours is indistinguishable from being up to no good?!

Hell, I'd have to _break_ the law and craft a truly new identity just to be able to be anonymous on some of these platforms that don't have real-world identities as a sign-up requirement.

The argument of "you're not doing anything wrong, so why be concerned about your privacy" is disingenuous. https://lifehacker.com/why-your-privacy-matters-even-if-your...

For my money, I can't help but think of people who have legitimate reasons for wanting privacy and how my relative lack thereof deprives them of it. For every one of us that has a well defined presence, it becomes that much easier to spot people who hide, and like you say, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to do so.

I would venture out even and say that categorically, there are unjust laws that people should be able to hide from - I would want to help them do that. By creating a culture that respects privacy, we insulate ourselves against a lot of the damage that can be done by a poorly managed legal system / toxic culture / opportunistic economic structure. I was just recently reading about how the military buys adtech data to track foreign nationals. I feel like we're living out a Gibson novel.

I do try to "fuzz" my presence as much as possible, because of this. However, like you mention, it ain't easy.

Thank you so much. I was worried recounting my experience would be perceived much like the first person responded. It feels good to know there are those out there that get it.

May your holidays be safe and rejuvenating.

I think the thrust of the complaint is that the society doesn't sufficiently value privacy for its own sake.

In a different kind of society, websites of the sort that you describe would be unpopular, because users at large would place less value on the real-person guarantee than on the non-collection of their identifying information.

Closely related to this is the topic of end-to-end encryption. To withstand attacks that I expect will continue to be mounted on it, I think the society has to believe in privacy as a terminal good. The answer to the argument that "we could catch such and such criminals if we had key escrow" ought to be "yes, and not catching those criminals is a price we agree to pay, because privacy is just that valuable to us".

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