The anonymous world of “extreme privacy”

It’s hard to disappear these days. Everything from renting property and using a credit card to working a job leaves a digital footprint. 

But just because it’s hard to vanish from the virtual world doesn’t mean people aren’t trying.

Some do it out of necessity, to escape violence or persecution. Others do it out of curiosity, pursuing total anonymity to see how far they can take the idea.  

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed their motivations and methods with Hal Triedman, a privacy engineer who recently wrote about the “extreme privacy” community for the online magazine Reboot.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Hal Triedman: I was really intrigued by this community, and I was intrigued to dig into the question of, are we the ones who are sticking our heads in the sand and being sort of ignorant of the reality of the situation? Or are they the ones who are going way over the top with their devotion to disappearing?

Lily Jamali: And as best as you can answer that question, based on your research, what did you find?

Triedman: As usual, it’s somewhere in the messy middle. One of the things that’s interesting is about the psychology that drives people to try and disappear, like what is it that is really making someone want to get rid of their digital double, to stop casting a digital shadow? And it comes from this sense of individualism, almost a level of paranoia, and a sense to take this hobby and sort of test it out in the real world. They imagine scenarios like, “If I were being hunted down by an angry, ex-significant other, or if the government was trying to persecute me, how would my threat modeling hold up and how would my privacy setup work?” And that’s a real, genuine concern for some of these people.

It’s true, you know, we should all probably be a little bit more secure online. We should be using things like password managers, trying to buy private products, probably not giving all of our data to Google and Apple and Meta all the time. But one of the things that extreme privacy adherents forget, oftentimes, is the political question that’s at the heart of this. It’s on all of us, it’s on the people who are sticking their heads in the sand with this sort of privacy fatalism and also the extreme privacy adherents, to stand up and look at the real problem, which is a political one, and try to answer some of those difficult questions about who should have power over our information in our society.

Jamali: What are some of the steps people who live this lifestyle are taking to remain anonymous?

Triedman: It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of 12-step process or anything like that, but they’re using all sorts of really interesting and usually open-source, independent software. So instead of Apple or Google or Windows, they’re using operating systems like Tails, which is this hyper-privacy-focused operating system that runs on Linux. On their phone, nobody really wants to use Apple products in this community, but if they have a Google Pixel, they’ll get rid of the normal Google Pixel thing and they’ll replace it with GrapheneOS. Instead of Gmail, they’ll be using Proton Mail, which is, like, fully end-to-end encrypted. They’ll text everyone they know with Signal instead of iMessage or Facebook Messenger or SMS. They’ll even go so far sometimes as registering private mailboxes, registering as South Dakota nomads, because you only have to live there for, I think, one day before you’re able to register for this. So, they’ll do all sorts of things from technical wizardry encryption on one end to these, like, legal machinations like anonymous [limited liability companies], hiding their address on their driver’s license. And the thing is, it’s difficult. It’s really difficult. This is like a full suite that changes your entire lifestyle.

Jamali: How do you do things like get a paycheck from your job or buy property anonymously?

Triedman: It depends to whom you want to be anonymous. It’s possible to buy cars, houses, rent properties all anonymously through things like Wyoming LLCs, which are pretty cheap and easy to set up. But oftentimes property managers or the people who were selling the house — or the car dealer, whoever —they’re I think rightfully a little bit sketched out by the whole prospect of selling to a completely anonymous individual or conglomeration of individuals, because they have no idea. So, it’s one of these things where you have to really explain what is, what the reasoning is, and some people get it, some people might not.

Jamali: As you’re describing this, it all sounds very exhausting, and I imagine it must feel isolating too. Did you find evidence of that when you were writing this piece?

Triedman: It’s really interesting. There’s this thriving write-in community where people contribute pieces to some extreme privacy-focused magazines. And a lot of the pieces have a focus on how this affects you from a mental perspective and also your loved ones. So, one of the leading lights of this community is this guy Michael Bazzell. He has a podcast and has written the book on extreme privacy, so to speak. And he talks a lot about how these things affect their families. He says, I want to make sure that all of my weird, dumb ways of doing this stuff doesn’t eliminate my family bonds. And some other community members explicitly focus on trying to keep this compartmentalized. Because if you drag people who are unwilling into this, it breeds resentment. It can be even more isolating than just the exhausting process of constantly thinking about “Am I at risk?”

Jamali: When we talk about data privacy, there’s often this question raised about whether people should care about their data if they have nothing to hide. Did you get the sense from the participants in the extreme privacy community, people who you spoke with, that they did have something to hide in some cases?

Triedman: I think when we’re talking about the “extreme privacy” community, there’s, I think, a couple of different branches of that. First of all, there are people — women, queer people, sex workers, people who might be gender minorities or sexual minorities — who are disproportionately subjected to online harassment, doxing, swatting, all of these horrific online practices. And on the other hand, there are people who are sort of curious about this. And I think that those two communities, in terms of their orientation and their drive to do it, really differ. I think that it’s important to disambiguate those two groups and say they actually might have different drives here.

And as far as having something to hide, I mean, I think that’s kind of a specious argument. I really think it’s important that we keep our wits about us because, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years, societal norms, legal norms, social norms can change remarkably quickly. If you had said in 2020 that Facebook messages would be used to prosecute people who were seeking abortions in the United States, most people probably would have said that’s kind of crazy. And yet we saw recently that exactly that happened with a mother and daughter who were prosecuted for having an abortion, or facilitating an abortion in the case of the mother, in part because of their Facebook messages. So, these norms can change and it’s important that we keep our wits about us and keep in mind, as every single young person in the audience has heard for their entire lives, that things on the internet are permanent. And you need to be careful about that.

So, I think that anyone who argues that they have nothing to hide so we should all be surveilled is really ignoring the fact that norms can change. Rules can change and nobody’s perfect, so as long as there’s something you might want to keep private and you wouldn’t want it to be in front of everyone, I think that privacy is a worthwhile value to pursue.

More on this

Beyond how people can practice extreme privacy, it’s worth asking whether they should.

On this point, Hal Triedman, in his Reboot article, cites author and activist Cory Doctorow, who writes that technology is a tool for social change because it can temporarily shield you from the all-seeing eye of a corrupt state. Doctorow says that this sometimes-temporary window can be an opportunity to push for a just, responsive and transparent government.

Triedman argues that extreme privacy hobbyists are in some sense turning their backs on making positive change for everyone. He writes that this approach can be rooted in deep nihilism about other humans.

Disappearing yourself may feel empowering, but the truth is that it’s inherently self-limiting. Triedman writes that “to disappear is to cede the space you once took up, to cast away the chance that, just maybe, your visibility could create change.”

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