How can normal users increase their privacy, safety and security online?
Over the last two decades, the internet quietly rebuilt itself around a business model that depends on knowing everything about you. Every app you install or use, every account you create, every website you visit, and every form you fill out becomes another data point feeding a system designed to track, profile, and monetize you and your identity.
This process is often referred to as surveillance capitalism and creates an economy where attention and personal data are the product and you are the raw material.
The mechanics of this are almost invisible day to day. A single email address becomes the thread that ties together your shopping habits, your health searches, your location history, and your social connections.
Data brokers exist specifically to aggregate these threads, buying, selling, and cross-referencing fragments of your life until they can construct a profile more complete than most people would recognize about themselves.
None of this requires a breach or a hack – it’s simply how the default internet works. Data brokers are often the most consequential handlers of personal information that operate without consumers’ awareness or informed consent.
The result is that privacy is no longer something you can expect. It has become something you have to actively construct, piece by piece, against the grain of nearly every service you use. The harms of this model are diffused and delayed and you don’t feel the effects of a data broker profile the way you feel a stolen credit card.
The damage shows up later, as spam, as price discrimination, as identity theft, as a general erosion of control over your own digital identity.
The graphic below shows the problem of using a single identity across your online actions. When a data breach occurs, everything connected can be exposed and tied back to you. Data brokers can use it to construct a complete picture of your life, and this valuable information is for sale.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have made the problem significantly worse.
Data brokers can now use AI to link your different actions in a way that was previously thought impossible. AI’s expertise is data analysis, working through vast amounts of information to correlate your actions into a valuable profile.
In this world of surveillance capitalism, can we shift the privacy pendulum back in your favor? Is it even possible to be private, secure, and safe online?
Every account you sign up for and every form you fill out connects back to you.
MySudo breaks that trail by allowing you to create multiple digital identities, each with its own phone number, email, payment card, and more, as a new set of credentials you can use so you stop handing over your personal information by default.
Personas and Compartmentalization
If surveillance capitalism works by linking everything about you into one exploitable profile, the countermeasure is structural (not just legal or political): break the correlating identifiers.
This is the premise behind compartmentalization. Instead of using one set of identifiers such as one email, one phone number, one payment method, one communication handle across every context in your life, you deliberately compartmentalize activities into separate, purpose-built personas.
One persona for online shopping, a different one for dating apps, another for travel, another for marketplace listings, and even another for that newsletter you’re not sure you trust yet.
Each persona operates as a self-contained identity with its own email address, its own phone number, its own payment method, its own browser, and its own communication handle. Crucially, these personas aren’t connected to each other or back to your actual identity in any way a data broker or advertiser could observe.
As shown in the graphic below, if a persona gets swept up in a breach, starts attracting spam, or gets sold to a marketing list, the damage is contained and is not tied back to you.
This is a fundamentally different privacy model than the one most security tools rely on. Most tools try to protect a single identity better with stronger passwords, better encryption, more careful permissions.
Compartmentalization instead assumes that any single identity is eventually going to become correlated and anticipates corrections by ensuring that no single identity is valuable due to its changeability. This process is less about building an impenetrable wall and more about not putting all your value behind one wall in the first place.
The elegance of this approach is that it doesn’t require the rest of the internet to change. You don’t need every company you interact with to suddenly adopt better data practices. You just need a layer that sits between you and them, generating and managing these personas on your behalf.
Anonyome Labs patented many of the ideas related to creation of online personas and compartmentalization, here are some examples:
How MySudo Puts This Into Practice
Compartmentalization and personas are an important advancement, but the harder problem (and the one that has occupied most of our product decisions) is making it usable by typical users and automatic enough that people can do it consistently, without a computer science degree, and without constant friction.
As shown in the graphic below MySudo was designed to implement this paradigm and enable each user to create up to 9 personas or Sudos. Each Sudo provides a different:
- Phone number that can make and receive phone calls and SMSs;
- Email inbox that can send and receive emails;
- Virtual payment card for purchasing online;
- Communication handle to enable end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging, voice calling and video calling (similar to WhatsApp);
- Browser for complete separation of browsing.
MySudo comes in two form factors:
- A mobile app for iOS and Android that allows each persona to communicate externally with phone calls, SMSs, and emails. It allows creation of individual payment cards and to have end-to-end encrypted messaging, email, voice and video. It also has a separate browser for each persona.
- A desktop companion app for Windows and Mac that allows management of persona emails in a form factor that provides support for longer and more complex emails. More features are coming to the MySudo desktop app soon.
MySudo is part of a growing family of privacy and security applications from Anonyome Labs that also includes a privacy focused VPN and Password Manager (coming soon).
Individual online privacy has been under surveillance and attack almost since the beginning of the web – and now users have identity-based tools to fight back. By creating multiple personas that allow you to compartmentalize your life, you too can reap the privacy benefits.
Your identity is already being pieced together. Stop handing over the pieces.
Download MySudo now to create separate digital identities that keep your personal information private and out of reach from data brokers, scammers, and the next data breach.
Sponsored and written by ANONYOME LABS.
