COVERT Protocol Action #10: Segment your Online Personas

Welcome back to the OPSEC Podcast. I am your host, Allen Pace, and this week we are covering the tenth and final step in the covert protocol, and that is covert protocol action number 10, which is segment your online personas. Now, segmenting your online personas, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this terminology, what that means is to deliberately create separate digital identities or personas for different parts of your online life so that your personal information, internet activity, and behavior, and interactions don't all link back to the same single profile. This will reduce linkage between activities such as shopping, social media, work, banking, et cetera, and limits how much data that the ad tech networks and trackers can build about you and helps contain exposure if one profile is compromised. Creating segmented personas can also help support, uh, what is called pseudo-anonymization, which is a really fancy word for saying privacy. It's a privacy technique to use alternative identities or aliases in order to not use your real personal details for activities and services that do not legally require it. Steps to segment your online personas are as follows. Step one, define your primary digital roles. For example, personal, work, banking, random online browsing, shopping, et cetera. Step two is to create a unique contact identifier for each persona, which includes name, location, email, login credentials. All of this can be stored in your password database of choice that you had set up earlier on in the covert protocol process. Step three is use alias tools to manage identities such as MyPseudo or Cloaked or IronVest. These services offer, uh, a really easy interface into creating multiple personas and for example, MyPseudo is one that I use very regularly, and it gives you a phone number, an email address, and a name attached to that, that you can create all of that on your own. Step four is maintain compartmentalization. For example, separate browsers for separate functions. I like to use a s- a specific browser for banking only, and then a separate browser for regular Internet surfing. Now, that only provides a very minuscule level of protection, but it does help throw off the profiles that the ad tech companies and the trackers create on you. Another method is to compartmentalize your browser with containers. There is a Firefox add-on that you can download that is Firefox Containers, which allows you to launch specific websites under a specific container, and it doesn't allow the cookies and the tracking devices to cross over. So for example, I like to recommend people have-- If they wanna use the same browser, they use the containerized format, and then they set up a container for shopping. And then they launch all of their websites where they make online purchases and any other commerce activities in that browser. They can set up one for banking, and they can push all of their banking websites into that browser container. Uh, that is not quite as good as using completely separate browsers, but it is another alternative to accomplish compartmentalization. And step five is regularly review and update as needed. In my