Completely disappearing from the internet these days is darn near impossible, and there
is no one tool or privacy hack that can completely hide you.
However, when you stack these nine relatively little-used privacy habits and tools together
- and I guarantee there are at least three of these that you’re not doing right now
- you can make some significant steps toward making yourself invisible online.
At the core of All Things Secured is the belief that everybody - tech-savvy, not tech-savvy,
celebrity or common person like you and me - deserve the right to privacy.
That’s why everything I’m about to share with is not crazy difficult or expensive.
But it does represent an important shift in your mindset that changes the way you share
and deal with your personal data.
Let’s dive in.
This may sound weird, but anytime I am asked to present a form of ID, whether that’s
in person or if I’m verifying something like a crypto exchange account, I try to always
use my passport.
Why?
The primary reason is because between my passport and my driver’s license, my passport has
less information about me.
Anybody who has a copy of the front of my driver’s license knows my full name, my
birthday, my height, my eye color, my physical address and they have my signature.
With my passport, all they know is my name, birthday and state where the document was
issued.
I admit this doesn’t make a huge difference, but again, when we string together a lot of
these tiny changes, it does have an impact.
These next few secrets take advantage of different tools and services that allow you to mask
your personal data.
For example, instead of giving out my home address to every person and company that asks
for it, I give them my virtual address to mask this information.
This virtual address receives my mail and packages and sends me pictures that I can
review on my phone.
I then have the option of having them scan it, forward it, delete it, whatever.
If you want to understand how this works, watch this video I published a few months
ago.
With the exception of government agencies and sensitive packages, I try to use this
address everywhere it can be accepted to mask my home address.
In a similar way, I am very picky about who I share my personal mobile phone number with.
Instead, I mask my number with a service like Hushed or Google Voice, which basically screens
all texts and calls through an app on my phone.
So how does this work?
You could buy a lifetime phone number through Hushed that allows you to send and receive
text and phone calls without actually giving away your real phone number.
Or your current number is already overwhelmed with spam could port your phone number over
to Google Voice, start over with a new number from your mobile service provider, and then
screen everything through the Voice app.
Using Hushed will cost you $25 but it’s super-easy to set up.
Google Voice, on the other hand, is free, but the process of porting and getting a new
number is a bit cumbersome.
It’s up to you.
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If you enjoy learning about privacy and security, you won’t want to miss what’s coming up.
So hit that subscribe button!
By now, all of us have used our personal email address to sign up for so many different services,
it almost feels like masking your email address is a lost cause.
Thankfully, there are a lot of new services that are popping up to make this very easy.
If you have any kind of Apple iCloud subscription, you automatically get to use their Hide My
Email feature, which I’ve explained in this video at the 3:31 mark.
There are other standalone services like FastMail or Blur by Abine that do the same thing for
a small fee.
It all boils down to the fact that again, you’re trying to mask the data that you’re
always giving out as you surf the internet and make sure that it’s data you can easily
trash or change.
I’ve talked about this a lot before, but I really like services like Privacy.com, Abine
Blur or Revolut that allow you to create virtual credit cards to pay for things online.
In other words, instead of giving away the number on your physical credit card, which
is difficult to change or replace, you’re creating a new virtual card for every merchant.
I have a card for Netflix that only works for Netflix.
I have a card for Amazon that only works for Amazon and has spending limits.
I have a specific card for any subscription service so that if for some reason I want
to cancel and they make it difficult, all I have to do is delete the card and they can
no longer make a charge.
Best of all, in terms of being invisible, some virtual credit cards, like those from
Privacy.com, allow you to use any name and address for billing so that you don’t have
to give away your actual name and address.
Have you ever done a search for your name on Google?
Especially if you Google your name and the city where you live, you might be shocked
at how much personal information is freely available online.
I’ve actually gone through and scrubbed my personal info off the internet such that
some services now list my wife as being unmarried and single.
The next step, of course, is to scrub my wife’s info, but you get my point.
It’s possible to scrub this data yourself, but I used a service called Delete Me that
I’ve already done a video on before.
You can watch that video next to see how that kind of service works.
A good portion of our personal information that’s floating around the internet is sadly
the info that we voluntarily publish on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others.
The extreme version of this kind of privacy tip is to tell you to just delete your social
media accounts.
That takes a special kind of person and if that’s you, you know who you are.
For everybody else, becoming invisible requires making Instagram private, locking down your
Facebook profile and simply being careful what kind of content you post.
When I surf the internet, I go between using both Firefox and Brave.
I’ve configured Firefox in a way that I’m comfortable with, but the advantage of Brave
is that it offers incredible privacy right out of the box.
Part of being invisible online is stopping services like Google, Facebook and advertisers
from following you all around the internet.
Brave does that and, as a result, actually speeds up most websites since they don’t
have to load these trackers.
Best of all, Brave is a free download with a bunch of other features I won’t dive into
here.
Last but not least, another way to make yourself invisible online is to use a virtual private
network or a Tor connection.
Now fundamentally, these are two different tools and I’ve explained the differences
in this video here, but the end result is that you’re trying to cover your tracks
as you browse through the internet.
A VPN, I use a service like ExpressVPN, can hide your IP address which reveals location
data.
A Tor connection, which there’s one available within the Brave browser, hides your traffic
by relaying it through multiple servers around the globe.
This is all just the tip of the spear, I realize.
There are so many more tools and tricks to make yourself invisible online, so I encourage
you to share anything I’ve missed in the comments below.
What do you think?
Are there other ways to hide yourself online?