How to disappear: secrets of the world’s greatest privacy experts
Today’s must-read: For the right fee, they will make you and your personal information very hard to find.

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“It’s extraordinarily hard, when every one of us is ceaselessly flaking off informational DNA, to live privately,” Benjamin Wallace writes. But these privacy experts know how to vanish people.

(Illustration by Mike McQuade. Source: George Marks / Getty; Corbis / VCG / Getty)

You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy.com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else.


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