The goal of joining a service, registering for a forum or subscribing to a feed is to provide some functionality, interest or entertainment. It is not to expose you to privacy, identity and reputation risks.
The best way to protect yourself is to avoid providing your personal information in the first place.
This does not apply to legal commercial transactions, such as signing up for PayPal or making a purchase. In those cases your real information is required, but it is also subject to much greater protections in law and you have allies in fighting any abuses. Good credit card companies are going to defend their card holders from online merchants who act unethically or illegally. So this guide is directed at the free services or trial services available such as GMail, Facebook, Windows Live and so on.
Microsoft is engaging in Identity Theft
Right off, you do NOT want to give these companies your real name. They frequently disregard the law, let alone the principles of privacy and some like Microsoft with its Windows Live service, will hold on to your identity and information for decades without your consent, transforming an ancient account into whatever new variations it chooses to create. You literally loose control over your own name and identity. When someone refuses to allow you to decide what happens to your identity when they have control over it, the Secure Surfing Organization views it as tantamount to Identity Theft. Yes, you understood that correctly: for all intents and purposes, Microsoft is engaging in Identity Theft when it refuses to remove from its systems the e-mail addresses and information associated with dormant or canceled accounts. [Editor's Note: since the writing of this article, Microsoft has, through its paid agent TRUSTe, stated that it does not hold on to user content or log records indefinitely. No specific time is given at which it will erase unused or cancelled user names from its records, so the possibility remains open that it could hold on to them for decades and most certainly "indefinitely."]
Step 1. Hide your IP address
Before we launch out to start creating web accounts or e-mail addresses, the very first thing we need to do is to protect ourselves from IP tracking, location aware targeting and recording and data mining connected to our IP address.
Anonymous surfing, or IP hiding is covered in another article on this site. You should read and understand that before continuing here. You will again face a choice of going the free, but more time consuming and sometimes frustrating route or subscribing to a reputable anonymizing service.
Step 2. E-mail Addresses
Almost all services require a new user to provide an e-mail address to register or sign up. Frequently, a confirmation message is sent to that address containing a link the user must click to confirm. In this way, the service knows that a real human being provided a real e-mail address.
But it is not necessary for it to be your “real” e-mail address. There are a number of alternatives that are more or less time consuming depending on what you want to do and how much separation you want between your identity and the service.
Taking a common case, assume you want to actively participate on a site including receiving notices, updates or messages from friends through the service. This means you will need an e-mail address that continues to be active after you’ve used it for registration purposes, and most likely you will want it to forward mail to your regular e-mail address so you do not have to worry about checking different e-mail servers all the time.
Secure Surfing e-mail addresses
If you are a Member of the Secure Surfing Organization, you automatically receive an unlimited e-mail account in the form of your...@securesurfing.net. The yourname part can be anything you choose, but shouldn’t be your real name if you wish to use it for privacy and identity purposes on the web. If you want one with your real name and another with a privacy name, paid Memberships include 10 free accounts with each additional account having a one-time setup fee of $2.00 (that’s literally just to pay someone to physically setup the account).
I want total control over my e-mail addresses
If you want total control, for very little expense you can obtain your own domain name and use e-mail addresses you build for yourself or your web services agency builds for you. So, assuming your name is Mary Example, and you bought the domain name “example.com,” you could then have a primary e-mail address of m...@example.com. Your primary address would be the one you use for direct communications with friends, family and known contacts. You may also use it for e-commerce sites such as PayPal. But you could have other domains such as regi...@sample.com that you use only for joining free web sites and such. Better still, you could do both, have your own domain name and use your some...@securesurfing.net e-mail address for open sites, registrations and so on.
I don’t want to join SSO and I don’t want my own domain
i. Then start by choosing a service other than the one you intend to use as your permanent registration e-mail address account.
A completely Do It Yourself and free method involves creating an initial free e-mail account with one service, using that account to create a second one with a different service, and then canceling or abandoning the account the first service. You can often find free e-mail accounts available from a local newspaper for a city in another state or another country.
Step-by-step guide
In this example, we are using the Canadian newspaper, the National Post, because it also offers an opportunity to see some of the complexities users face when simply participating on many web sites.
When you register for an account with the National Post, you will find that you are actually registering with a parent corporation’s portal site, canada.com. You learn about the parent corporation if you actually are able to read through the massive privacy policy to learn that it is CanWest Global and that the same privacy policy covers a bunch of newspapers and media companies other than canada.com and nationalpost.com. This is very common and users are often members of entire networks without ever being aware of the fact.
In this case it’s fine because it is actually canada.com that will provide us the free e-mail account. We chose this site because it makes providing postal address and other information optional. All you need is a reachable e-mail account. The site also claims to delete any account that is not active for 30 consecutive days, but we know this is not true because we logged on with an account that had not been accessed for three years and were still happily let onto the system.
But, the fact that they publicly assert that they do delete inactive accounts could prove very useful.
When you click to register you are asked to pick a “screen name.” We chose “SecureSurfing.” For First Names we chose “Monitor” and Last we chose “Secure Surfing.” We are using the e-mail address we have for monitoring Google activity, moni...@gmail.com. Type in the captcha code, click to accept the terms and privacy statement and click Finish. we are told that a confirmation e-mail has been sent to moni...@gmail.com.
Side Note: The ONLY reason we have accepted the Terms is because we have NO INTENTION whatever of ever doing anything with canada.com or the National Post. In fact, the Terms and Conditions of CanWest Global are among the most offensive in existence, comparable to the coercive theft represented by Walmart.com’s terms. Both companies (and many others) contain language that transfers from you to them all rights and interests over anything you submit or contribute to their web sites. In the case of canada.com they even explicitly cause you to transfer “moral rights” which is a right in common law that protects you from your creations being used to embarrass or harm you or in a way that fundamentally alters the spirit of the work, even after someone has acquired monetary or legal rights to your work.
We are using them here partly because their policy is such a glaring example of hypocrisy (they’d sue your pants off if you tried to use anything they created) and partly because because we intend to ignore the account after our initial purpose.
So off we go to our GMail account and sure enough we find a message from the National Post with a confirmation link. When we click the link we are told that our “canada.com community membership has been verified.” Yippee but we still don’t have an e-mail address.
We click on “Go to communities” and once there notice in the top right corner a link to “webmail.” We click that.
We are then invited to “upgrade” to include a free e-mail account. Finally we’re getting somewhere. we click that and it asks us to choose an e-mail address. We type in “securesurfing” and voila, secu...@canada.com is available.
Now. The point of this whole exercise was to get an e-mail account as a temporary confirmation destination to use for getting a permanent secondary e-mail account. There are many other services, some are easier, some more demanding. (Shameless Plug: Possibly by now you think your time is worth more than the price of a Secure Surfing membership and want to leave it up to us to get through all this stuff for you?)
The Secure Surfing Organization maintains e-mail accounts with many free services as a means of tracking what those services are doing with and/or to users. Our sponsor, Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. also provides a service to businesses and professionals in which they create user accounts over an array of web sites using the real names of the people with SSO contact information as one means of reputation protection (i.e. assuring no one is registering under their names and then engaging in harmful or disreputable activity).
ii. Select the service you want to use as the permanent confirmation destination.
Remember the intended use of this account. It is only to receive confirmation messages from other sites and services that require you to provide an e-mail address to join. There is no intention to use it for sending and receiving any other mail, nor to use any other service that may be part of the account. So it should be okay to ignore terms and conditions and we can prefer a service that only offers e-mail. For this example, we’re going to use mail.com.
The link to the signup page is https://signup.mail.com/, a secure connection which is nice.
The routine is pretty much the same. First name: Secure, Last name: Surfing, but e-mail address has a bit of a twist since we get to choose a domain as well as the name. There are a lot of domains mail.com offers for e-mail addresses, but it need not concern us much what domain we choose since it is not one with which we will be doing anything substantial. For this exercise we chose the domain “lawyer.com” so a complete e-mail address of secu...@lawyer.com.
We create a password using KeePass Password Safe because we’re keeping this account and then we come to the “alternate e-mail address.” This is where we take the account from exercise (i) and enter secu...@canada.com.
Side Note: You should not be using the same name for these accounts. We are using securesurfing on both of them because we do maintain active accounts as described earlier, and they are accounts for an organization, not a person. So in following this guide, do not imitate too closely. Be sure to use completely different names unless you are registering for reputation defense purposes — a whole different scenario.
Notice that this account does require additional details. Choosing the United States is fine regardless where you are actually situated. We frequently choose Hollywood and zip code 90069 because it fits a demographic that would attract marketing predators. Put in whatever you like, just make sure that the city/state match the zip code you enter. Zip codes can be easily looked up through a search on Scroogle or IxQuick.
Note that in our experience, mail.com has never actually required a confirmation e-mail. The account is set up immediately on completing the registration and they state the reason for the alternate e-mail address is only to send you log in information in the event you forget your password. So it seems that any e-mail address could be entered here, even a completely fake one. We haven’t tested that ourselves and do not intend to test it to avoid introducing unknown variables. You are encouraged to enter a completely bogus email account if you like and see if it pans out okay.
iii. Abandon or Delete the first account
Now that we have got our e-mail account with mail.com, we must either delete the original one or just never go back. In the case of canada.com, recall that they state they delete all accounts that have been inactive for 30 consecutive days. That means we do not have to do anything to delete the account ourselves. Should anything unacceptable occur due to the existence of the account after 30 days, canada.com has publicly taken liability by giving us assurance they would prevent it from happening by deleting the account. Sweet.
Step 3. Go join your brains out.
Using your “confirmation address” account, go ahead and join Facebook and MySpace and Google.
Just don’t use your real name — your Facebook/Myspace/whatever friends should have no more trouble communicating with you as SmartSurfer than as Sally Jones.
Don’t ever provide your real address or phone number.
Also recognize that many services have compulsory theft of intellectual property in their Terms and 
Conditions that requires you to allow them to steal anything you submit, whether photos of your children or the years of wisdom you have acquired in your craft. More to the point, you will have completely wasted your time on privacy protection if you post a bunch of personal data on these services. Hoard your personal identity and be aware how services profile you.
We implore you, truly, check the Terms and Conditions before you post anything you value to any site. The Secure Surfing Organization has a Terms of Service Library which anyone can use. For SSO Members there is a Rating Chart that quickly identifies the kinds of Terms sites have, ranging from Compulsory Theft to Respects Users.
And don’t forget to take that first, most important step of getting some Online identity protection solutions from Anonymizer.
