Easy to Understand Computer Tips

Fun With Avatars
Online Privacy
Start Recreating Yourself for Fun
Other Options You Can Use
An Easy Step by Step

Fun With Avatars

Your online presence doesn’t need to allow people to track your private information. Instead of being an online presence, create an avatar. The point is that what everyone sees is a fun creation a disposable avatar can do your bidding for you. Change everything regularly. You can change emails, profiles, stories, fantasies, name, and anything else you can have fun with. Data collected is fictitious, and then it disappears. Your friends are the only people who need to know the real you from real life.

I decided to change when I discovered how much information online databases knew about me and it was associated with my real name. The internet knows more about the real me than I do. Now, that person disappeared.

Online Privacy

You can beat the spyware and have an adventure doing it. So many legitimate (LOL) companies spy on us every time we log onto our computer. Maybe some of us don’t consider Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so many others legitimate just because they do spy on us. We are entitled to that opinion whether they feel bad about it or not. But what if we took the profit out of it?

There are some fun things we can do that will do just that. It will be like going on vacation every time you log onto your computer. The thing that makes vacations more fun than anything else is that nobody knows us. We can let our hair down and do things we don’t do at home. We go out dining more often or let go of our inhibitions in others ways. People frequently fall in love on vacation only to find the person they fell in love with acts completely different when they are not on vacation having fun.

That’s what we do on vacation. We have fun not being ourselves. That is how we beat "Big Brother", in reality, MySpace, Facebook, and other corporate data miners are the true big brothers of our time. We create a new person to operate our computer. We create a disposable person we can throw out when it suits us. We can be anyone we want for as long as we want. I am not inventing something new. Criminals do it all the time to avoid being caught. But we can do the same thing to keep our privacy and take the profit out of online spying

Before we go into how it’s done let’s look at the other side of the coin. Most of the internet is free because there is profit in giving away free stuff. Companies can sell more online because search engines track user interests to help you find what you’re seeking for free and then deliver ads to the right buyer (you). You get ads for things you are interested in because your behavior is stored in databases all over the internet. Companies give away free stuff so they can get information about you and offer you other things you might like to buy. They all pay for the free portion of the internet.

Those databases are holding more than your internet address. The social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook are putting all of your personal information into databases that you can’t delete. You can search the internet to find birthdays, ages, and residences for the last fifteen years, employment history for the last twenty five years, and much more. These are actual examples of real searches. If that scares you it’s time for us to have some fun.

Your internet computer should not contain any real information about you. If your computer is for games, email, and surfing the internet this is not a problem. Later, there will be a list of suggestions for using computers for serious stuff. To start, sit down with a piece of paper and make up a person you would like to be. Was it your dream to become a musician or a world traveler? Do you wish you were a doctor or lived at the North Pole? Your imagination is your only limit to the amount of fun you can have.

 Make up a name, address (somewhere you don’t live), an occupation or career, hobbies, friends, past vacations, and even a fantastic life history. Then when you get on your computer become that person. Spyware on your computer will peek into all your programs and look for information about you so when you install software be that person. When you install Microsoft Word and it asks for your name it doesn’t care if it’s your real name, just that you paid for it. When you create a login name, use your fantasy name. Everything on your computer and the internet should be about this make believe person.

To start with, get a secure email online like hushmail.com using your pretend name. Use that email to join social networking sites. If they want you to use their email, verify it through your secure email with your new identity. When you get involved in social networking use your avatar, your make believe persona. Tell only your friends who you really are in a separate email and refer them to this article to explain what you are doing.

Other Options You Can Use

If you use your computer for important things like personal records, professional records, online cash transactions, or banking it is best to use a separate computer for that. If you cannot use that alternative there are several other options. You can use a free program like TrueCrypt to create a secure folder on your computer. When True Crypt is not running the folder is completely unreadable. You can put files, passwords, and even install programs in that folder. That is the easiest way to hide your real information.

If you are more technically inclined there is a third option. You can create a partition on your computer’s hard drive and install a copy of your operating system or another free operating system like OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, or Linux. There are plenty of easy to understand directions on the internet. What you have then is two computers in one; one for secure important functions, and one for carefree fun. Be sure to use the professional system only for business and personal needs to keep out the spies.

Our presence on the internet is not just your name. Your browser is so unique it can be used like a fingerprint if enough information can be requested. It can reveal what fonts are on your computer, what plug-ins are installed on our browser, your email address, our ip address, and other things that make our online connection different from everyone else.

There are tools that can confuse or restrict these impressions as well. Privacy settings, multiple browsers and email clients. My default email  client is never used because it is set to get bogus email from foolu@gotcha.com. That’s the email address that is given away by all my browsers so spam goes to Timbuktu or somewhere closer to the beach if anyone at Gotcha surf wear is using that email. We become the ghosts of the internet. We become make believe people who exist for a short time then get tossed out like old email addresses. We fill data miners to the brim with useless information.

Step by Step For Creating Your Avatar

Step one: Create your Avatar, Your Private Online Character

You can be as elaborate as you please. Give your avatar as much data as you can imagine, like an character in a book or a D and D character. How tall are you? What color are your eyes? What planet do you live on? What timeline do you live in? Really!! Mess with the online data collectors.

Step Two: Get Your Avatar an Email, Try an Email Anonymizer

This is the only link to your old self so if you are really concerned with privacy, use an anonymizer.

Step Three: Create an Online Presence, for Your Avatar

Let your avatar join MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the others you like. Stop using your old social network. You can close it but it will never be deleted. Your Avatar is your real online name. The companies that track you online are rich or powerful and you are devaluing their data so this might eventually be as illegal as using an alias for fraud in real life.

Step Four: Advertise, Let Your Friends Know

Introduce your friends to your avatar. You can send them a link to this article to explain why. Use your new email for everything online. Refer people to your new social network that you created for your avatar. Do not reply to ads, promotions, or spam sent to your old email. That person has vanished into the ethernet (or internet).