Often services online require you 2
to register and give personal information, 3
things like email addresses, home address, 4
even your phone number and other personal information. 5
As you’re aware, 6
you need to minimize the information that you give out, 7
and the amount of places that you register. 8
This protects you from identity theft, 9
it protects you from privacy invasion, from spam, from fishing, etc. 10
Where possible, simply avoid 11
creating an account or registering. 12
One service you can use, 13
or try to use is BugMeNot. 14
So say for example you want to 15
use some of the services on IMDB.com, 16
do a search on here, 17
and there are shared accounts that you can use 18
for IMDB that will give you access 19
to the functionality that you want to access, 20
that you normally access if you’re registered 21
via the shared account. 22
And there’s also a plugin you can get for BugMeNot. 23
So this will work for a number of sites, 24
as long as you don't need 25
to use that logging for anything private, 26
you want to use it generically, then this works just fine. 27
If you have to register, 28
say for example you want an account on a forum, 29
then use fake information wherever possible, 30
name, address, age, location, etc., 31
as none of these are generally verifiable. 32
Often you need to enter an email address 33
for registration, as it is used 34
to send you a verification email. 35
One option is to use 36
what are known as throwaway or disposable email accounts. 37
Guerrilla Mail is one of the most well known, 38
so if you look here, 39
this has auto generated an email address for me. 40
If I register with that email address, 41
I’ll start to see my emails here 42
and then I can respond to that for my registration. 43
There are a number of other ones available, 44
here are some of the other ones. 45
But obviously, remember, anyone else 46
can read these emails 47
who knows this unique email address 48
and the hosting company can, 49
so this is more of an anonymity thing over security, 50
and of course, if they send you passwords 51
via this disposable email account, 52
then you obviously do need to change it. 53
But if you want to keep access to this service, 54
and you want some security out of the service, 55
then probably the best option is to use an email account 56
you have set up for this purpose, 57
being the identity you are associating 58
with the service you are registering for, 59
separate from the email attached to your true identity. 60
You can also set up an email account 61
just for throwaway registration, 62
separate from the email account 63
you normally use for communication, 64
such as register123@gmail or the likes, 65
something like that. 66
That’s what I use for registration 67
when I do need to register for things 68
that are low priority services. 69
Some services require phone verification 70
via voice or sms. 71
There are sites you can use to receive sms messages, 72
you can use these for sms verification. 73
They are public though in the same way the emails are. 74
So if you see here, 75
this is an example site, 76
you would give them this phone number 77
and these are the text messages 78
that are getting sent to this all the time. 79
And if we click here, 80
you can see this site offers 81
a number of different phone numbers 82
that you can choose to register with. 83
And you can see this is receiving messages all the time, 84
some interesting messages here, I wonder what this is all about? 85
I mean, people can use this obviously for non private, 86
but anonymous communication with people. 87
If you do a search for receiving sms's online, 88
or searches like that, 89
then you will find other sites 90
that do the same 91
and there are lots of them, and some of them are free. 92
There’s a list here on this link 93
of 10 such sites where you can receive sms messages. 94
But it may not be suitable 95
to use a public service like this. 96
If you need serious anonymity, 97
in some countries it may be easier 98
to buy a sim card and a phone with cash, anonymously, 99
these are known as burner phones. 100
You can use one of these for the registration 101
and then not use it again. 102
Switch it on away from your home 103
and preferably in a crowded place, 104
receive the sms confirmation and switch it off. 105
Obviously, this is only for those 106
with serious anonymity needs. 107
Nation states do monitor for burner phones, 108
phones that are switched on occasionally 109
for short periods of time, 110
then they cross correlate it 111
with other phones in the area for profiling. 112
You can buy verified email accounts 113
and other verified accounts, 114
if you look on hacker forums 115
and dark web forums that are already pre-verified, 116
and you can buy them with Bitcoin anonymously. 117
You would need to search 118
on the various forums for such services.