DISGUISE YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS
Generate a fake online personality
Setting up a fake online profile to trick someone into befriending you - a practice known as ‘catfishing’ - isn’t illegal but it’s certainly unethical, and is not what we’re encouraging with this feature. However, there are clear privacy and security benefits to using fictitious details when signing up with websites. Not only will it stop criminals and spammers obtaining your personal data, but it helps to limit your digital footprint - details of your interests and activities that companies can use to target you with ads.
Rather than make up information each time you’re asked to provide it (which can prove surprisingly tricky), use the excellent Fake Name Generator ( www. snipca.com/40277 - see screenshot right) to create your alias. This free site offers random, ready-made identities for the gender, nationality and country of your choice, from Australia to Uruguay. It goes far beyond merely generating names, and provides a realistic address and postcode, a fake phone number that automated site tests will deem valid, a disposable email address, a birthday and star sign, mother’s maiden name, physical characteristics such as height, weight and blood type, an occupation and vehicle, and even your alter ego’s favourite colour. Although Fake Name Generator doesn’t have a mobile app, you can transfer your new identity to your phone by scanning a QR code and adding it to your contacts.
As well as protecting your privacy when you register with websites and online services, Fake Name Generator can help authors flesh out their characters and give web designers data to test their databases. The site stresses that it doesn’t “condone, support, or encourage illegal activity of any kind”, and that the fake credit card and national insurance numbers it provides “can’t be used to make purchases online or to obtain employment”.
Fill in fake personal details on online forms
One drawback to using Fake Name Generator is that you need to copy and paste its false information into the relevant text boxes on websites. Rather than risk having your browser auto-fill your real name and other personal details, you can use a browser extension to enter fake data in online forms. This will help you avoid online fraud, unwanted communication and intrusions into your privacy, without hampering your access to web content.
Our favourite tool is Fake Data ( www. snipca.com/40281), which fills in as much or as little bogus information as you require, and is available for Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, and Firefox. Simply right-click a text field and choose an option from its menu, including first and last name, username, address, phone number and more, or choose to ‘Fill entire form’ with random data (see screenshot below). You can also use keyboard shortcuts to enter these details - right-click the extension’s toolbar button and choose Options, then Settings and click Keyboard Shortcuts to set up this feature.
By default, the extension is set to use ‘English (United States)’, but you can change this to ‘English (Great Britain)’ on its General Settings page to obtain more appropriate entries, such as UK postcodes when you choose ‘zip’. Note that the email addresses Fake Data generates aren’t linked to an actual inbox, so don’t use them for a site that needs to verify your account. If you upgrade to its Ultra plan for €2.99 per month (about £2.55), you get a disposable email address and phone number for account authentication, but the free version is sufficient for casual fakery. We explain the best free ways to fake your email address on page 53.
Use a different name on social media
Facebook expressly forbids you from using a false name in your profile. Its rules state that: “The name on your Facebook account should be the name that your friends call you in everyday life. This name should also appear on a form of ID” ( www.snipca.com/40276). Fake profiles are regularly purged from the social network - 1.8 billion of them in the most recent figures (see www.snipca. com/40285) – but if you’ve ever received friend requests from obvious spam
accounts, you’ll know that many slip through the net.
It is possible to use a different name on Facebook - after all, the company itself has changed its name to Meta - though the option is intended for users who have changed their names by deed poll or because of marriage, divorce or gender reassignment. Abusing this could lead to Facebook suspending your account or even deleting it. If you’re prepared to take that risk to protect your privacy, click the down arrow in the top-right corner of the Facebook website, select ‘Settings & privacy’, then click Settings. On the General Account Settings page, click the Edit button next to your name and type your preferred pseudonym. If Facebook suspects you’re trying to switch to a fake name, it may reject your request or ask for proof that you’ve changed your name legally. Click ‘Review Change’ (see screenshot below) to choose how your name appears in your profile, then enter your Facebook password and click Save Changes. Note that you won’t be able to change your name again for 60 days, so don’t proceed unless you’re sure you want to stick with it.
Twitter is much more relaxed about fake names, which is why celebrities verify their identities with a blue tick, making it harder for people to pretend to be them. To change your displayed username, click More on your profile page, choose ‘Settings & privacy’, then ‘Account information’ and enter an alternative name in the Username field. Fake your profile picture on websites
Using a fake name and personal information helps keep you anonymous online, but what about sites that require you to provide a profile picture? Not only does this tell other users exactly what you look like, but facial-recognition tools can also ‘scrape’ your photo, identifying you to third-party companies and potentially to cybercriminals. There are simple workarounds, such as wearing glasses or a hat, or covering your face with a mask or even fake facial hair, but advanced AI tools can see through these ruses. And grabbing a headshot of someone else from the web, such as through Google Images, breaches the photographer’s copyright (and subject’s privacy) and could land you in a lot of trouble.
One solution is to fight AI with AI using a site that generates deepfake photos of people who don’t exist. Generated Photos ( www.snipca. com/40292) provides more than 2.6 million copyright-free examples of these, and has a clever – if rather creepy – tool called Face Generator (see screenshot above). This lets you design a fake profile picture by customising an Ai-created person with the gender, age, skin tone, hair colour and facial expression of your choice. You can download the resulting image for free, but it includes a watermark for the site (which is a major giveaway) and limits the size to 512x512 pixels. For larger, unwatermarked shots, you need to buy credits - a single deepfake costs $8.97 (£6.73), but the price is reduced the more photos you buy.
If that sounds too expensive or makes you feel uncomfortable, a free tool called Fawkes ( www.snipca.com/40293) offers a more subtle way to foil facial recognition. Developed by students at the University of Chicago, the program uses a process called image cloaking to make tiny, pixel-level changes to your profile photos. These adjustments prevent facialrecognition algorithms from identifying you, by teaching them a “highly distorted version of what makes you look like you”, without blurring or ruining the picture.
Download and run Fawkes from www. snipca.com/40294 - be warned that it’s a large file (594MB) - and click the Select Images button (see screenshot below). Choose the image you want to ‘cloak’ and click Run Protection. After a minute or so, Fawkes will save the tweaked result to the original folder, so you can upload it to sites that ask for a profile picture. To the untrained human eye, it won’t look much different, but it will fool invasive facial-recognition tools.