Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery.
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Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery.
Derek Sivers
Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery.
2023-02-02
Because of my open inbox, I meet a lot of strangers. I love it. Almost everyone tells me who and where they are in the world. If they don’t, I wonder.
Am I talking with someone from Australia? Philippines? Brazil? Are they 20 or 60? Male or female? It doesn’t really matter, but the brain can’t help wondering. It’s human nature to want to know who’s speaking. If they don’t say, it creates a mystery.
Films do that to deliberately engage curiosity. A voiceover on a black screen says, “It took me a long time to get here.” You immediately wonder, “Who is ‘me’? Get where? What happened?”
Once people start wondering, they need to know. Mysteries are intriguing. They’re unsettling.
That’s a problem if you really want to be anonymous. If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity. You know who they are, but they don’t know who you are. It feels rude. An obsessive personality might make it their damn mission to figure out who you are! You don’t want that.
So for real anonymity, don’t create a mystery. Create a believable persona. Then nobody will wonder.
If you don’t want any attention, just pick a very common name like Mary Kim or Adam Johnson.
Use an AI face generator to create a completely believable face to match your new name. Download it once and use it everywhere. Run it through face aging software to use this same persona for the rest of your life.
Pick a city and say it’s your location, to avoid that question too.
For email, Mailbox.org is great, and doesn’t care who you are.
Create social media profiles with your new name, email, city, and face.
Nobody will wonder who you are if you answer that question. Instead of block and battle, deflect and settle. That’s better anonymity.
But if you want to be both anonymous and famous, pick a name that is rare but believable. Cool but not too cool. Tom Kahlo. Keaton Carolina. Miles Wenley. Pick a name that has the .com domain available, so you can really brand it.
Now you can create anything online freely, and nobody will doubt your identity. Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions. Then, instead of wondering who you really are, they can focus on what you’re really saying.
© 2023 Derek Sivers.
Copy & share: sive.rs/anon
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- Will (2023-02-03) #
“pick a name that is rare but believable. Cool but not too cool”
Like “Derek Sivers?” 🧐 - Mikhail Yasnev (2023-02-03) #
interesting article, as for me I prefer to focus on solving issues by dicsussing them with people and inventing some new solutions compare to become famous
agree with your being belivable person is extremely important
so for me using my real name without investment of money or time to PR is fine - Jessica Winthrop (2023-02-03) #
People have been doing this for years anon. It has only been more recently that more sophisticated social ops have been taking place online. See the comment section of financial youtube, its all shit bots talking to each other.
- Rajesh Pantula (2023-02-03) #
Basically become Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Rose C. (2023-02-03) #
Aight. Here's mine... whaddya think?
https://www.pdxlocal.net/portland-confidential-part-one-of-several/ - Merek Rivers (2023-02-03) #
To get you started...
https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ - Rudolf (2023-02-03) #
Being anonymous/faceless in the web is like walking through a city in full camouflage. You stick out.
- Lucent (2023-02-03) #
I had to do this for Twitter. After tweeting once daily for 8 years but never replying I got a lot of pathological intrigue and irritation. Rebranded as a comedy writer pretending to sell a book and everyone stopped caring and left me alone.
- toldierone (2023-02-03) #
Some people call this idea "data pollution".
Also mystery and deflection are not mutually exclusive, from my experience the more they desire to find you, the more willing they will be to believe what they manage to find.
Also I for once do want to be interesting enough to be someones obsession, and I believe in my opsec and I'm not afraid of anyone. - toldierone (2023-02-03) #
Also I appreciate that this site has comments enabled, for some reason (probably spam) it's a dying trend.
- Mike (2023-02-03) #
I like your idea. Since I am lazy, I found a few generators that make short work of creating a persona:
- Generate names in various languages:
https://blog.reedsy.com/character-name-generator/
- Generate a backstory (I included an example):
https://www.character-generator.org.uk/vh93qxw/maureen-is-curious-semiprofessional-sports-person-who-is-obsessed-with-murder.html
- Generate a face:
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
- The Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generator makes me laugh whenever I use it. Only the syllable count matters:
https://benedictcumberbatchgenerator.tumblr.com/ - Laurentius Zamoyski (2023-02-03) #
Not so fast. Here's my reply on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647506
- dev (2023-02-03) #
vastly underrated strategy ive been using for years. idk if this is part of anyones organizations security protocols but it should be.
people stop looking when they think they have answers, so give them the "answers". - Richard Dyce (2023-02-03) #
So, I tried out one of your posters suggestions, on a whim... and visited the English Name Generator. It came up with "Piers Meyer" which to a Brit sounds cool I guess... so then I did a search, just to see if there were any collisions in the real world... and guess what? I got this hit https://www.amazon.co.uk/WHY-FIBROID-HIDDEN-CAUSES-REPRODUCTIVE-ebook/dp/B0B68C88SN
Read the bio, I'll wait.
Yep, he/she is an anonymous author. At least pretty sure the backstory belongs to someone else. They're also quite prolific. ;-)
https://www.amazon.com.au/PIERS-MEYER/e/B0B4N6RJKQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1 - Sean Crawford (2023-02-03) #
I see a lot of safe (unlike females) men using a false name. I don't know whether this is right since it is cultural appropriation of the romantic names of street kids and runaways. For those half-starving people, sometimes romance is all they have.
Incidentally, at the end of a Buffy-the-vampire-slayer episode, a street girl receives Buffy's street name, Ann, and uses it as a power symbol. Later we see Ann as a good youth worker on Angel, showing that people like Ann can mature and get life skills.
I think the African word ubuntu means real people in real community, enjoying reciprocity. - Ev Bogue (2023-02-03) #
I'm pretty sure I have one guy who's been emailing me for years doing this exact thing.
He pretends to be a huge fan, then he emails repeatedly all day long, then he pretends/complains that my app is broken, and finally he wanders off and I don't hear from him again for months.
He's sent AI generated images of himself (his face looks the same every time, but the environment is different), he has an entire backstory that never quite makes sense, and he claims to be in the Midwest but I went as far as to log the IP addresses contacting my server just to make sure and he was always pinging from Russia.
Is he doing this to you too? Is it a group of people? This demands an investigation.
Regardless I still just keep answering my email even if I say like "ok." and "hi." and "yah Bogbook seems to be working fine for me, except for the known bugs I haven't fixed yet." and I don't waste too much time replying to the guy. - Jim Bevenhall (2023-02-03) #
WGASA. Just commenting for... yeah, anonymity
- brodster (2023-02-03) #
how do you deal with video chat requests/interviews?
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