lol

1. Use a VPN
2. Limit personal identifying content that can be cross referenced. Example: I just got a plane ticket on Sunday to go to Bora Bora.
3. Never post self identifying material. Example: here's my new tattoo!
4. If you post something time related that can lead to 2 or 3, change details. Basically, lie. Example: last week I went to Bora Bora. Really it was Fiji 3 months ago.
5. Don't give them a reason to want to investigate you. There's plenty of Left leaning folk (some of whom probably are pretty far up in corporate and/or government spaces) who quite frankly aren't worth going after. The time and energy it would take to round up people who just think differently, the opposition doesn't have (most likely).
6. Change your profile on the reg. Personally I don't do this, or do I? (SEE #4)
7. Go periods of time without posting. The more you post, the more you will likely have a signature in the way you post, what you post about, and who you interact with.
8. Delete posts (not sure how effective this is but if I feel like my posts are rearing too close to #2 or #3 I'll go back and delete them).

Anyhow I just booked my trip to Uzbekistan via cruise liner where I intend on instigating the revolution by introducing vegan pilaf. During this time I will only post Kelly emoji to convey my progress. o7 o7 o7

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good collection of articles and guides that are not just practical but teach you how to think about your own particular situation: Surveillance Self-Defense

First thing is you need to think about your "threat model". Which means what information are you trying to protect, and why? There is no universally "best" way to do anything. Tactics that might increase security/privacy in one situation might impair it in another. Like if you are trying to avoid getting doxxed by random internet people who take a dislike to you that's one thing, but if you are trying to avoid government (which government(s)?) spying that's another. If you are trying to avoid government spying, is it to avoid legal prosecution, or to avoid covert interference in your organizing (ala COINTELPRO)? They can be totally different kinds of surveillance so you need to have different strategies to avoid them.

Also need to consider that making an extremely elaborate or onerous plan that you will never bother to actually enact, or requires a high degree of technical skill or perfect execution might not be practical. They might interfere with your purpose too much.

This page covers the basics of how to think about your own goals, fears and priorities. It's very generic but is a good overview. It's really key to think about this ongoing to avoid falling into the trap of following advise that might be perfectly reasonable for another person but counter productive for yourself.

My biggest opsec is just deleting 90% of my post before I actually post them.

Afaik the implementation of Lemmy this is a real problem due to federation to other instances, you can post things here that end up somewhere you don't want them to and if you delete them it's not certain if they will also be deleted there as well. It's been stated for a long time but it's one or the other really, you can't have a decentralized social media without federation, and you can't have full privacy with federation. I might very likely be wrong about the specifics of this, but this should be also taken in account when considering to post something more personal.

In addition to this (and because of the inevitably of just flat being honest when posting) I have a tendency to 1.) add deliberate misinformation occasionally to poison the info (like saying I grew up on the west side of Philly, just spending most of my childhood days shooting basketball with the boys), and 2.) burn accounts after enough time has passed. My current one is long overdue for that treatment.

My pets are the cutest but my op sec game is too strong

There's definitely value in spiking your posts with false data to obscure who you are and where you live. Lie about where you live or travel to, what car you drive or where you work/have worked. If you think you've revealed a bit too much about yourself, burn your account and make a new one, or better yet, gradually move from one account to another so it's harder for people to track you to your new acct. Blur out backgrounds in photos you share that may have things like licence plates on cars, shop names or street signs. Think critically about how a drip feed of PII (personally identifiable information) may not be enough to pin you as one individual, but enough yo narrow it to, say, 100 or so who may go to a certain bar or venue, or live on a certain street. A sufficiently motivated chud may think that those odds are good enough to shift from online to offline work and potential harrassment.

I used to delete all my comments on occassion. Nowadays I just add false information about my self at times

I throw in a few lies here and there to keep em guessing.

Good post and should be stickied.

The culture generally leans towards anonymity but there's some leeway for how much you personally.fond necessary. I've got a record, anything I post here really doesnt matter, it's posting consistent with my arrest record. But I still try to.be vague and keep a general culture of relative anonymity going on. I've described my tattoos but I'd never post a picture of them, I'll post pics of the inside of my house but not my house. If you go through my lists it's pretty easy to tell.ehat city I live in but I've never explicitly said so. I'd say probably my piss poor level of personal security is thr bare minimum and I'm a bit internationally sloppy cause if feds are looking me up.its gonna get a we'll established file and it's a waste of their time. Others, maybe not so much. Just be cautious, there's people out here to whom jail is less of a big deal. Be a cautious cat as standard practice.

I know I'm bad about it. I delete my account every couple of months but I bet a dedicated person could track me down based on my posts.

Though I'll say that in the real world I've gotten more guff for not having a mainstream social media account than for openly expressing my communist views. Even lost a job offer over it once (though I consider that a bullet dodged) because I had shared with them my linkdin acct that only has my resume and they wanted to check a Facebook acct that I've never had.

My OpSec has been lacking recently across all social media. I need to set up a new internet identity entirely but I'm too lazy for that.

For voicing your opinion about activism,
I'd recommend to at least use:

• A burner account,
  do not post your opinion through your daily account.
• A paid, no-log VPN or Tor when posting.

Above should cover the needs of most people.
But if you think you're a high profile target,
then following would also be smart:

• Alter you writing,
  do not post in similar writing as your main account, e.g. if you usually capitalize each sentence, don't, if you usually use emoji's, don't etc etc.
• Use a privacy oriented OS to post on,
  e.g. no Windows, no Apple, no closed source Android fork, but do use QubesOS, or TailsOS, or GrapheneOS.
• Only use chat clients with E2EE (End to End Encryption) and without identifiers, e.g. SimpleX.

Remember. We all live in Liberal Mt.

I'm a strong advocate of regular account restarts. I've probably been through 20 since the site opened, due a new one now really.

I don't think there are any rules, just recommendations. If a person is already publicly known, it probably doesn't matter if they keep being open about it here.

The thing i personally think people should be focused on is compartmentalizing their internet activity. Cross-site tracking is pretty much everywhere these days. So if you have a twitter, instagram, lemmy, reddit, pintrest, whatever it is you do online. If you do not want your activity on lemmy to be linked back to those accounts you should be using a different browser for lemmy, preferably something like Librewolf. Privacy focused. If your really feeling paranoid go ahead and use TOR browser to login to lemmy. Assuming they dont block TOR connections here I've never tried.

Burning your accounts not a bad idea either. Back when i used reddit id make new accounts regularly and never use the old ones again. With lemmy i dont bother tho. Even if you make a new account regularly on a site as small as this its pretty easy to see if an account showed up around the time your old one went inactive and then followed all the same communities your old one did. Not a big assumption that is your new one then. the way you type, and words you use can also be fingerprinted and used to ID you across accounts. Of course you can take steps to prevent this type of tracking too if you want.

If what you want tho is to not get some chud sending you death threats thats pretty easy to accomplish. Make yourself a new account, dont post any personal photos, and only give very vague information about yourself. For example, How old are you? I'm in my 30s, 20s, etc. Dont say the exact number. Whats your name? Its Xiisadaddy as far as your concerned. Whats your gender? Irrelevant need to know only. Chuds arent that smart. They can only find you if you hand it to them on a silver platter.

Now let me see if i can find out some info about you from this account: Based on your profile just a quick glance tells me, your a woman, live in australia, seems like maybe you or someone you know was in the military, you live in an area with public transport that isnt good, a food desert, your landlord has a meth test cause in your lease, probably live in an apartment building, you have a niece, and siblings, and are autistic. I'm guessing late 20s, early 30s? Took me maybe 10mins to get all that. Don't feel like putting in more effort, but yeah id say you need a new account. Thats some pretty specific stuff an internet stranger just found out about you in 10 minutes. (reply to this and let me know if you want me to delete this comment btw so its gone too if you decide to get rid of your account)

Funnily enough ive been considering making a new one too this might be what pushes me to do it.