The below paragraphs contain links to outside websites and sources of data; we maintain that the individual must verify the links therein.
This rule should be digested and accepted as a rule most cardinal in its importance: do not maintain a personal social media account. Maintaining a personal social media account, in which one may post pictures or videos of oneself, friends, place(s) of residence; likes and dislikes; walls of text in the public space and so forth is a means of identification, doxxing and suppression. If the principles of DHitMA are undertaken, we forcefully recommend that one remove oneself from social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube; or at the very least: refrain from posting personally-taken images or videos, making public comments and using such applications frequently.
- To become more anonymous on the Internet, there are some initial things one should do:
- We maintain that personal social media is unnecessary and risky, so we do not recommend its use; if it is used, post with common sense (no "I'm going on vacation" posts, refrain from political statements, etc.)
- Delete unused accounts to reduce your online presence (unused social media accounts go first); go through your old password book and delete as many unused accounts as you can
- justdelete.me: justdelete.me has links to a lot of sites' account deletion pages; you can go through here and delete any accounts you may have
- Purge your Google data (Maps, especially) and turn data saving off for the future; one will be shocked to find that every trip ever taken, short or long, is recorded in perfect detail in one's Google profile
- Take it a step further, and request an opt-out from data broker/people search sites (there are others):
- acxiom
- BeenVerified
- Infotracer
- Intelius
- LexisNexis
- TruePeopleSearch
- In hoarding data, specifically smaller bodies of curated data (like Mega folders), it is necessary to create some number of user profiles. Below are listed the key points of online anonymity preservation as regards profile creation:
- Do not use your real name at any point
- Do not interject any information that may be personally identifiable or traceable back to your person (family names, friend names, physical details, hobbies, recent activities, etc.; leave nothing to chance)
- Use burner emails: DHitMA: Private Communication Means
- Use different usernames for every profile of every service (do not let your username become known and linked to multiple accounts)
- In communicating with others, it is eventual that one will begin to send messages. Below are some considerations for this scenario:
- ENSURE THE IDENTITY OF WHOMEVER YOU ARE COMMUNICATING WITH; otherwise, practice restraint and do not compromise yourself, as a bad recipient could potentially reveal your identity and your affiliation(s)
- When sending links, trim the link to the shortest possible length; often, links are appended with special characters (#, &, etc.) which are followed by long stretches of characters- these characters may look random, but it may be a product of a JavaScript function, and it may contain information about oneself
- Do not use words, phrases or sentence structures peculiar to yourself; obscure your identity through varied speech; this is a worry, due to the practice of stylometry, which is the science of studying linguistic style; you can be identified through a couple thousand words, if you are not careful
- Do not use more than one communication means at once; procure a different IP address (either with a VPN or Tor) and use the other desired application
- Do not respond to any one message quickly: cogitate upon it and reply in an anonymous manner
- Never send messages or videos taken with your phone's camera or screen-capture function (the metadata within can be traced back to you); if it is necessary, use a screen-capturing tool to take a snippet of the picture/video without including any identifying information (status bars, time/date, background applications, etc.), rename it to something random, and then send the file
We recommend the interested reader peruse Whonix's article on maintaining anonymity online: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNot (https://archive.is/nKtz4).