QoTW #49: How can someone go off-web, and anonymise themselves after a life online?

Everything we do these days is online, whether through our own social media, purchases from online stores, tracking by google, Amazon etc., and the concept of gaining some sort of freedom is getting traction in the media, with the leaking of NSA snooping documents and other privacy concerns, so before Christmas I asked the deceptively simple question:

How can someone go off-web, and anonymise themselves after a life online?

Which ended up being the most popular question I have ever asked on Stack Exchange, by a good margin.

Lucas Kauffman supplied the top rated answer – which goes into some detail on heuristics and data mining, which is likely to be the biggest problem for anyone trying to do this successfully:

Avoiding heuristics means changing everything you do completely. Stop using the same apps, accounts, go live somewhere else and do not buy the same food from the same brands. The problem here is that this might also pop up as a special pattern because it is so atypical. Changing your identity is the first step. The second one is not being discovered…the internet doesn’t forget. This means that photos of you will remain online, messages you posted, maybe even IDs you shared will remain on the net. So even when changing your behavior it only will need one picture which might expose you.

The Little Bear provided a short but insightful message, with disturbing undertones:

You cannot enforce forgetfulness. The Web is like a big memory, and you cannot force it to forget everything about you(*). The only way, thus, is to change your identity so that everything the Web knows about you becomes stale. From a cryptographic point of view, this is the same case as with a secret value shared by members of a group: to evict a group member, you have to change the secret value. (*) Except by applying sufficiently excessive force. A global thermonuclear war, with all the involved EMP, might do the trick, albeit with some side effects.

Question3CPO looks again at statistics on your financial footprint, but with a focus on how to muddy the waters with:

When it comes to finances, it’s similar; I have to make an assumption that the data I receive are an accurate indicator of who you are. Suppose you make 1/3 or more of your purchases completely away from your interest, for instance, you’re truly a Libertarian, but you decide to subscribe to a Socialist magazine. How accurate are my data then? Also, you may change in ten years, so how accurate will my data be then, unless I account for it (and how effective then is it to have all the historic data)?

and Ajoy follows up with some more pointers on poisoning data stores:

1. Make a list of all websites where you have accounts or which are linked to you in some way.
2. One by one, remove your personal details, friends, etc. Add misinformation – new obscure data, new friends, new interests, anything else you can think of. De-link your related accounts, re-link them to other fake ones.
3. Let the poisoned information stay for some time. Meanwhile, you could additionally change these details again. Poisoning the poisoned! Ensure that there is no visible pattern or link between any of the poisoned accounts.
4. Then you could delete all of them, again very slowly.

There are quite a few other insightful answers, and the question attracted a couple of very interesting comments, including my favourite:

At the point you have succeeded you will also be someone else. –  stackunderflow

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