Social Media.

In accordance with the DFE mantra, if you want to remain anonymous online, begin by deleting your social media accounts. Don't just stop using your accounts, purge the data entirely. This includes accounts you haven't used in years, like your old Facebook profile from 10 years ago. Every piece of data related to you on the internet can be aggregated and used to build a better picture of who you are, so every possible piece should be located and eradicated if you want maximum anonymity.

This doesn't just mean the obvious offenders like Facebook, Instagram, and X. It also means every dead profile you created for school, work, gaming, dating, forums, hobby groups, side projects, and whatever other nonsense seemed worth signing up for at the time. An abandoned account is still useful to anyone trying to map your online presence, especially when it contains the same username, avatar, bio, or email address that you use everywhere else.

The same rule applies to services that are not traditionally thought of as "social media" but still encourage public identity. LinkedIn is one of the worst examples because it packages your employment history, geographic location, professional network, and headshot into a neat little dossier for strangers. If your goal is privacy, that is obviously terrible.

If you insist on keeping some accounts, reduce the amount of information they expose as much as possible. Remove your employer, hometown, school history, phone number, searchable email address, and any other data that makes correlation easier. Lock the accounts down, review the privacy settings, and assume that anything you post may eventually become public anyway.

If you feel the need to retain some repository of information about yourself, whether for your own reference or for family members and friends, consider creating a private network using something like Mastodon. You will have complete control over your data, including what is shared and who it is shared with.¹

References

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/im-running-my-own-mastodon-server-on-a-raspberry-pi-heres-what-ive-learned/

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