The best way for two people to keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
This is how to completely erase yourself from the internet in five steps.
In 2017, I was swatted.
Major commotion this morning. Police storming Whispering Oaks Lane.
An anonymous call was placed to my local law enforcement that I had murdered people and was holding others hostage.
And it was after this that I decided I was going to spend the time to figure out how to disappear.
There are five steps to completely erasing yourself from the internet.
I felt like I needed to get to stage four and that gave me a level of comfort so that I could sleep peacefully at night.
Can you disappear from the internet? What are the trade-offs?
That's what we're going to talk about today.
Step 1. Installing ad blockers on your devices is one of the lowest hanging fruits that you can accomplish in order to decrease corporate surveillance.
The big two companies are extracting $700 per year from your information.
It can cost you $100,000 over your lifetime.
Ad blockers are not so much about stopping the annoyances of people trying to sell you things on their websites.
Rather, it's about a deeper underlying problem.
The corporate surveillance machine that is building a profile on you and using that to discriminate against you.
Digital discrimination is what happens when corporations employ various tactics to surveil you and build profiles about you.
For example, if they catch you using higher-end luxury computing equipment, they may jack up the prices on you.
The internet is highly booby-trapped.
It's not just about which websites you go to.
It's also how you interact with a number of different internet services.
For example, are you searching for health-related questions?
All of these things can be factored into your profile.
What do you lose?
Well, you'll probably find that some of the services that you deal with simply don't operate quite as well when the ads are blocked.
And this may, in fact, completely break some of those websites.
Step two.
Kill the spies inside your house.
Your TV is a snitch.
Your vacuum is a wiretap.
You're giving your data not only to that one company, but potentially to dozens of others as well.
And these are often referred to as trusted partners or sub-processors.
Your data gets leaked not only to one place, but to many different places, thus exponentially increasing the likelihood that it makes it out into the wild.
The optimal solution here is to ditch those smart devices.
Don't buy them in the first place.
Or if you do, don't enable their Wi-Fi functionality so that they can phone home.
But in some cases, this isn't an easy option.
One possible solution here is called the Pi-hole.
What is a Pi-hole?
This is some software that was designed to be able to run on an incredibly cheap computing device called a Raspberry Pi.
And the goal of this software is to completely black hole any network traffic that is going to leak your data to third parties.
Here's what we gain.
We stop leaking as much information.
You are adding more complexity to your home and to your network.
Configuring a Pi-hole is not exactly straightforward if you're not very technical.
If this Pi-hole device stops working for some reason, you may have other issues where other devices and other applications stop working.
Having a single email account is one of the most dangerous decisions that you can make when it is, in fact, a control point for all of the other services that they're using.
Your email account becomes a single point of failure.
I will have an identity that covers one specific set of things.
So any specific physical address that I am living at, I'll have one identity, email address, name, phone number, credit card, so on and so forth that I use for things associated with that particular silo.
That way I can reduce the total number of accounts that I have to keep track of to just a handful rather than potentially hundreds or thousands.
And you have to take great care not to cross contaminate the different identities.
You don't want to put the phone number for one identity into a service provider that's owned by a different identity, for example, because the entire point here is that you're operating under the assumption that this data, this identity stack, can and likely will eventually get leaked, whether maliciously or through legal means and data brokers.
And by keeping all of your identities segregated, you can ensure that a compromise does not ripple out across all of the different aspects of your digital life.
This comes with additional complexity.
So by creating these segregated identities, you now have a lot more moving pieces that you have to manage.
So there are many different aspects of your day-to-day life that are a matter of public record, especially when it comes to property ownership, really anything that is regularly taxed, whether that be real estate, vehicles, boats, any of these things, most people tend to register in their real name.
And those create publicly searchable records that are then ingested by a number of different providers and data brokers that makes it very, very easy to find where most people live.
So I have not given up conveniences like owning real estate, owning vehicles and so on, but legally I don't own them.
I have corporations, trusts and other legal entities to make it very difficult to determine that the true beneficial owner of those properties is actually me.
If you're going down this route, I would recommend looking for attorneys that deal in wealth management that deal in helping high net worth individuals.
They are more likely to have also set up privacy preserving legal structures before the DMV tends to have the most onerous requirements when it comes to reporting your address of residence.
You know, they want multiple different proofs of residence, and really the only way I found around this is to actually have a decoy residence.
By that, I mean find the absolute cheapest apartment that is available for rent that will get you a utility bill and a physical mailbox address, and that will generally be sufficient to appease your local DMV.
One of the things that you have to do when you get to this level is you basically have to attack yourself on a regular basis.
You have to pay private investigators, skip tracers, so on and so forth, to use the tools at their disposal to determine whether or not you have made any mistakes.
By completely burning your paper trail, you put yourself into a position of extreme security against various threats.
You can no longer be doxxed, you can no longer be swatted, this is a level of freedom that I find very peaceful, it lets me sleep better at night, but it comes at great cost.
You are now operating with near complete invisibility, but you have to maintain a heightened sense of paranoia.
Step five: Disappear completely.
Past this point, it's no longer about data hygiene or your daily habits, it's about completely erasing your existence.
No more phones, those little surveillance devices we all carry around.
No more smart devices in your house that ping third-party service.
No modern cars either, as they tend to be surveillance devices on wheels.
You probably can't buy any sort of travel service that is going to KYC you.
That is, any ticket that requires your government name to be on it and is going to get checked against a government identity.
That takes all airplanes, trains, and a lot of boats off of the table.
You're probably going to be limited to car-based travel, and even then, you may, in certain parts of the country, have to worry about things like tolls.
Personally, I prefer to always carry my passport with me and I use that whenever I'm required to present identity verification.
This is preferable to your driver's license because the passport does not have any address on it.
If you give a driver's license to a hotel concierge, you should expect that they're probably going to type out the address that's on your driver's license and put that into their system.
So don't even give them the option of doing that in the first place.
The only way that you can really ensure that no human ever leaks any other information is to never come in contact with any system or any human to even give them the opportunity to do that.
This is the final frontier of privacy.
If you get to this point, you don't have to worry about corporations or really any bad actors finding you and coming after you, and any of this information being used against you in any number of ways that are difficult to predict.
Those are the five steps to completely erasing yourself from the internet.
Each of you will have to decide what level of trade-off between convenience and privacy you're willing to achieve, but you don't have to go all the way, all at once.
You can start at step one, see how that goes, and if you want to bite off more, you can always do so later.