I’m 16 and would really like to write an anonymous blog about my life. However, I’m really not sure how to go about doing this, as I am afraid that people would find out that it was me. I read your post about how to blog anonymously and there was just so much information and things I would need to do, such as creating a new email and so forth. So, I was just wondering if you could help me and give me some tips on how to do it; any advice that you can give me will be gratefully appreciated.
That essay was written by my friend Dr. Brooke Magnanti, who used to blog under the name “Belle de Jour” and eventually wrote a series of novels from her blog. Brooke knows a lot more than I do about this subject, as does Violet Blue (who wrote The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy). But the good news from your viewpoint is that as long as you register with an anonymous email and avoid talking about your blog to anyone else, you will probably be able to remain anonymous. See, it’s virtually impossible to stay anonymous if someone with resources wants to penetrate one’s identity badly enough, but that takes money and time and effort, so unless you become super-famous as a blogger (as Brooke did), it is highly unlikely that anyone will invest that kind of effort in doxing you. Consider me, for example; I’ve been insulting cops & politicians and undermining prohibitionist bullshit for almost six years now, and I haven’t been doxed yet. That’s certainly not due to my being some kind of tech witch with impenetrable security, because I’m not; it’s just that I’m not famous enough or dangerous enough (yet) to justify the kind of money and manpower needed to out me (though I have no doubt the FBI has a file on me that includes my real name, clothing sizes, copies of all my X-rays back to puberty, aerial photos of my property and an exhaustive description of my sexual preferences). But as long as you 1) stick to blogging about your personal life and avoid rattling the cages of the powerful or interfering with the money-making schemes of sociopaths; 2) successfully resist the temptation to tell friends about your secret identity; and 3) clean your browser history & cache every time you sign off so your parents can’t snoop, you probably will never have to worry about anyone figuring you out.
Good luck, and enjoy the creative outlet!
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
Excellent advice. Unless you have a government agency with a lot of resources to waste after you, only very cheap attacks are a concern, and these stem mostly from you making mistakes, like posting photos with your clear-name in the metadata, telling people about the blog, using an easy to trace email address (think Google), etc.
Now, getting technologically very hard to break anonymity is possible, but it requires a lot of expert knowledge and even experts make mistakes. Do not even try unless you want to become an expert in that field and are prepared to make that a main occupation for a decade or so of your life. (If you are inclined to do so, the field of IT security is evolving, highly difficult and very, very interesting. I do not recommend entering it without anything below a full CS master from a good university though, as at the lower end the pay and work conditions suck badly.)
I would add use a TOR enabled browser (torproject.org) and only blog from a public wifi (never use a hotel wifi as that is how they caught General Petraeus’ stalker, instead use fast food places).
This won’t prevent the State players from finding you, but like you mentioned, they would really need to want to find you badly to put forth the effort needed.
Assuming you don’t blog anything that attracts the attention of law enforcement agencies, anything that could get you sued, or anything that could piss off hackers or some of the internet’s more resourceful assholes, the technical parts of anonymity aren’t too arduous. Dr. Magnanti’s guide is excellent, although probably overkill if your life isn’t as complicated as hers.
I’ve spent a bit of time trying to uncover the secret identities of some anonymous bloggers (it’s like a dog chasing a car, I don’t know why I do it, and I certainly don’t dox them), and I’m convinced that the biggest risk comes from the people close to you.
If over the course of several months of blogging you reveal that you’re a 16-year old female, you have dark hair which you don’t curl, you live in western Pennsylvania, you have three cats, you make homemade jewelry, and you have an amusing story about falling off a horse, then almost any friend or family member who stumbles across your blog will instantly recognize you.
Once your friends and family know about your secret blog, either because they figured it out or because you told them, they will be tempted to interact with your blog. One anonymous blogger I know had a commenter drop her real first name. He used his real name and from that I found his place of work, and the staff bio on their website had a bio of a coworker with the same first name who had biographical details that matched the anonymous blogger.
Even if your friends don’t out you, by interacting with you under their real name they are outing themselves, and that gets interested snoopers (like me) the identity of someone in your life, which gets awfully close to you. If your friend has a public Facebook page (or whatever you kids are using these days) and they share their friends list, then a snoop will get information about you. They may not know which friend is you, but now they’ll have a list of names for checking against other data sources. And so on.
If you’re not keeping the blog a secret from your friends (or if they figure it out) then you should probably explain to them the importance of keeping your identity private.