Often services online require you
to register and give personal information,
things like email addresses, home address,
even your phone number and other personal information.
As you’re aware,
you need to minimize the information that you give out,
and the amount of places that you register.
This protects you from identity theft,
it protects you from privacy invasion, from spam, from fishing, etc.
Where possible, simply avoid
creating an account or registering.
One service you can use,
or try to use is BugMeNot.
So say for example you want to
use some of the services on IMDB.com,
do a search on here,
and there are shared accounts that you can use
for IMDB that will give you access
to the functionality that you want to access,
that you normally access if you’re registered
via the shared account.
And there’s also a plugin you can get for BugMeNot.
So this will work for a number of sites,
as long as you don't need
to use that logging for anything private,
you want to use it generically, then this works just fine.
If you have to register,
say for example you want an account on a forum,
then use fake information wherever possible,
name, address, age, location, etc.,
as none of these are generally verifiable.
Often you need to enter an email address
for registration, as it is used
to send you a verification email.
One option is to use
what are known as throwaway or disposable email accounts.
Guerrilla Mail is one of the most well known,
so if you look here,
this has auto generated an email address for me.
If I register with that email address,
I’ll start to see my emails here
and then I can respond to that for my registration.
There are a number of other ones available,
here are some of the other ones.
But obviously, remember, anyone else
can read these emails
who knows this unique email address
and the hosting company can,
so this is more of an anonymity thing over security,
and of course, if they send you passwords
via this disposable email account,
then you obviously do need to change it.
But if you want to keep access to this service,
and you want some security out of the service,
then probably the best option is to use an email account
you have set up for this purpose,
being the identity you are associating
with the service you are registering for,
separate from the email attached to your true identity.
You can also set up an email account
just for throwaway registration,
separate from the email account
you normally use for communication,
such as register123@gmail or the likes,
something like that.
That’s what I use for registration
when I do need to register for things
that are low priority services.
Some services require phone verification
via voice or sms.
There are sites you can use to receive sms messages,
you can use these for sms verification.
They are public though in the same way the emails are.
So if you see here,
this is an example site,
you would give them this phone number
and these are the text messages
that are getting sent to this all the time.
And if we click here,
you can see this site offers
a number of different phone numbers
that you can choose to register with.
And you can see this is receiving messages all the time,
some interesting messages here, I wonder what this is all about?
I mean, people can use this obviously for non private,
but anonymous communication with people.
If you do a search for receiving sms's online,
or searches like that,
then you will find other sites
that do the same
and there are lots of them, and some of them are free.
There’s a list here on this link
of 10 such sites where you can receive sms messages.
But it may not be suitable
to use a public service like this.
If you need serious anonymity,
in some countries it may be easier
to buy a sim card and a phone with cash, anonymously,
these are known as burner phones.
You can use one of these for the registration
and then not use it again.
Switch it on away from your home
and preferably in a crowded place,
receive the sms confirmation and switch it off.
Obviously, this is only for those
with serious anonymity needs.
Nation states do monitor for burner phones,
phones that are switched on occasionally
for short periods of time,
then they cross correlate it
with other phones in the area for profiling.
You can buy verified email accounts
and other verified accounts,
if you look on hacker forums
and dark web forums that are already pre-verified,
and you can buy them with Bitcoin anonymously.
You would need to search
on the various forums for such services.