As promised before this, I am going to write about this Lesson 102 article.
Before you continue reading this, I want to warn you. This tutorial is to teach you how to protect your identity by becoming anonymous on the Internet. If you are expecting to read this tutorial to commit something nasty, then please fuck off, this is not the thing you are looking for.
Recently, after I of my friend was stalked on the Internet, there is another case happened to my other blogspore friend as well. She received hate mails and asked her to leave a competition. So see? This is the disadvantage of showing your personal use email address everywhere. I am glad she is ok now.
So, become invisible is very important to protect yourself!
Anyway, this post will be a very short post.
Step 1. Do not reveal your personal details.
This include, your name, phone numbers, address, your working place, your birthday, your relationship status as well as who you know in reality.
Step 2. Do not put you pictures online.
As what I have said in “Lesson 101”, upload your pictures online will only let identity thieves to harvest your pictures and use your pictures to commit nasty activities. Also, in case if any information on Step 1 is accidentally revealed, the stalker can see your picture to confirm your online profile to identify that this is really your account. He/She will then start the stalking.
Step 3. Do not put your personal use email address or personal use instant messengers ID online. This will cause your email and IM IS get harvested by spam bots to send you spam. And or those identity thieves, you will use your email address and send fake emails to those people you know to sabotage you.
So how it is possible for them to do so since they do not have access to your email account?
This is a very interesting question. They can always install a email server application and set the server(or even just on their own PC) with your email’s provider domain. Then they create an account on that fake email server with same like your email’s username, then they can just send out email using your email address without you knowing what is exactly going on.
Although some email service provider do have source domain verifier to check whether the email is really send of the legitimate server or not, but not much email provider have such features. So the recipient of the email will think it is actually you are the one who are sending the email, hence, conflict will be started by these fake emails.
So far, I only found that Gmail, Hotmail/Live Mail, Yahoo Mail have such kind of verifier.
Usually those company private email servers do not have such verifier. So if a stalker send an email to your boss at your company email address ie: [email protected] to your boss [email protected], saying that you don’t like him because he is an ass hole and wanted to resign because of this, your boss might be firing you for that reason without waiting for your resignation letter.
Therefore, if the email address is for your personal and business/work use, don’t make it public. For the one you wanted to use for socialize with people online like MSN, YM, Facebook, MySpace or even for other bloggers to contact you etc, use another email!
Step 4. Do not use any real information of any social networking websites.
Use only fake information on those social networking websites. There is a lot of social networking websites do sell your information to spammers. Among some of these spammers, there might be some people who are actually like to stalk people for no reason. You won’t know whether you are that unlucky or not until you are the victim.
I realize that a lot of people posted everything about them self on Facebook. Although Facebook is a very trustworthy social networking service, but you will not know when their website might having glitches and accidentally exposed those information that you wanted to keep private to the public, as Facebook is often make changes on their web interface and adding new codes into their websites.
Sometimes, it might be your own mistake for accidentally enabled some private information to the public due to accidentally click on something without you realize it. So if you wanted to stay invisible, avoid to use any real information on your social networking accounts.
And if you are wondering, No, I am not anti social. I do have Facebook account at HERE. The only thing is, I do not reveal any of my personal information and any of my pictures there.
Step 5. Do not have physical contacts with anyone you know from the Internet.
Everyone also know about this anyway. But still, I am going into detail about this.
Do not give any of your personal detail that you have been hide from Step 1 to Step 4 to anyone you know on the Internet. This including your personal email address, your phone number, your pictures, your working places, your address, your every personal information!
Although some people you think they are trustworthy when you chat with them online, this doesn’t mean they are really trustworthy. They can ask you to give them your phone number and your picture, and promised that they will not give anyone. But at the end, they will spread those information all around the Internet!
If you meet some of the people you know from the Internet face to face, the risk you have for losing your anonymity will even be higher! Here is some example:
Anjing(a girl) know Babi from blogging and Facebook, Babi always comments at Anjing’s blog and Facebook status updates. So one day, Babi ask for Anjing’s MSN, Anjing give her MSN to Babi. Ok, just MSN only, still no harm. Then Anjing and Babi chat on MSN. They always chat and become very close to friend other. While chatting, Anjing find that Babi is a very nice person, very polite in every words he is using, very understanding and very charming as well. So Anjing send Babi her MySpace link and authorized Babi to see her pictures that had set to private views only. So far no one has actually see Anjing’s picture before.
Now Cibai, a friend of Babi also wanted to know Anjing after Cibai had read Anjing’s blog, but Anjing don’t want to know him because Cibai is very buaya in all of his coments in Anjing’s blog post. Babi also had promised to Anjing that he will not give Cibai her MSN and other information. Cibai very angry, but he can not do anything.
Anjing got one friend, a girl named Dog. They both are friends in reality. The both are in fact best friends. Everything they do, Dog will sure blog about it in her own blog as well as upload the pictures on Facebook. But Dog has promised to Anjing that she will not tag her in the picture and will not reveal that who is the online identity of the girl in the pictures. Anjing’s online identity is still safe until now.
Then one day, Babi asked Anjing to come out and meet for hang out in some shopping mall. Anjing hope to meet Babi personally, but she is afraid, so she asked Dog and Elephant(a girl, another blogger friend of them) to come out together. Since Babi also know Elephant, he agree that Dog and Elephant to join them for the meet up. After some chatting, Babi just remember about another blogger who named Gaban, a male blogger who they all know as well. So they asked Gaban to join them too.
A few days later, after they had set where to meet and when to meet, they are meeting each other at The Hamchat Mall. The went for karaoke, then they go and watch movie at cinema. Finally, they go and have dinner at the food court. Babi is started to show some strange act. He started to talk to Anjing with some unusual words. Anjing do realize that Babi had been acting strange since they were in cinema where Babi is keep on finding chance to hold her hand. Then finally, when at the time they are all wanted to go home, suddenly Babi offered to send Anjing go home. Anjing rejected and say Dog is driving, Dog is living near her place, so it is better if Dog fetch her home.
Seeing that he have no more further chance to talk to Anjing, Babi asked Anjing to go aside with him for a short talk. Babi told Anjing that he is attracted to her, he want her to become his girl friend. Of course, Anjing rejected him. Anjing already have a boy friend, furthermore, Anjing and Babi just really know each other for one day only. Babi is very sad, but Anjing thinks that it should be ok, and told him “We can be friend as usual mah.” Babi just keep quite and looks very sad.
When Anjing arrive home, she go and bath and rest for a while. After a few hours, she turn on her PC and online. She was so amazed when he see Babi is posting up all the pictures they had taken during the meet up although Babi had promised not to expose any of them. So Anjing contact Babi via MSN and asked him to take down those pictures politely. But Anjing was astonished when Babi reply her “You do;t want to become my girl friend, this is what you get. There will be more things you can see after this!”.
Anjing is very sad and complained this to Dog, Elephant and Gaban. They all asked her to just ignore and don’t talk to Babi anymore. Then next day, Anjing found that all her MySpace pictures which was originally set to private views was posted in Babi’s blog. Babi even posted those pictures and labeled those pictures with words like “Slut”, “Bitch”, “Whore” etc. In Cibai’s blog, Cibai even posted some of those pictures that Anjing sent to Babi previously and these pictures was edited horribly. Cibai put Anjing’s head on gorilla’s body, Pamela Anderson’s body and a lot more! And the most worse is, both Babi and Cibai is posting all Anjing’s information online! Anjing was getting a lot of spam mail and obscene emails after those blog post!
Ok, end of the story.
So whats the moral of the story?
Do not meet anyone you know from the Internet and let them know about those information you want to keep privately. Although you think some of these people are ok. But since you do not know them well yet, you will have the risk that they will betray you. Especially those opposite gender ones.
There is some people who are really sincere to you, that really depends on your luck.
In fact, I do know some of these people who are really sincere to friends.
To be honest, I am not totally anonymous now. But I am glad that I know some of those people who are really sincere to friends. Those who treat me as friends after meet up, and not treating me like “just another blogger”.
Anyway, if you are started to earn from your blog, then I will have to say, you will not be able to become totally anonymous. Some of your information will have to be reveal to some people, especially when you are writing advertorial for some company in Malaysia. But as long as the company respect your privacy, you can still maintain 80% of your anonymity.
By the way, you can still be anonymous if you just write advertorial for those US based advertorial agency. US company only want to know your Paypal account to send you the money, they won’t even care that your articles is actually copy and paste from other places. It is good for anonymous blogger, but bad for advertisers. There is Pros and Cons anyway.
So conclusion, if you want to be 100% anonymous, then you will have to sacrifice your opportunity to earn from your blog. If you want to earn, you will have to expect that you are going to lose your anonymity. You can still be anonymous, but not 100%.
Since this article is so damn long already, I think I might continue it at part 3, “Lesson 103: The Art Of Nonexistence”.
At Lesson 103, there might be some information that you can use if you are a politic writer. But I fear that some people will use those knowledge to do something nasty. Anyway, I will be start drafting that article soon. Some sensitive knowledge might not be publish out in that article. I don’t know yet, lets see how is my mood when I am writing that article few more days later…
🙂