The Ultimate Guide to Aliasing For Privacy & Security

[@techlore]

What's your aliasing solution look like? Share all your cool tricks below!

[@HimanshuBoruah]

Custom domain + Zoho mail + Catch-all. Unlimited aliases + full control + no ads. Costs about 25USD for 10 years (the price of the domain).

[@shanetravel]

@@HimanshuBoruah catch-all? and where you getting 10 years for a domain at 25$?

[@HimanshuBoruah]

@@shanetravel Catch-all is a feature in custom domains. It lets you capture any email sent to any invalid email address of your domain. Just look it up. You'll find many articles explaining it in a far better way than I'd ever be able to. And regarding domain name... You can buy one from namecheap. I'm not sure which one is the cheapest domain but the one I bought (for 10 years) cost me about 25USD. And zoho has a free tier for custom domain users with unlimited aliases.

[@ammaarshamail]

I use Simple Login and because im a student they generously turned my account into a premium one so i can enjoy the benefits..

[@liesdamnlies3372]

Been using SimpleLogin since you mentioned it on this channel...or maybe it was Cyberspatial...I can't remember at this point... _hem_ Anyway, been using it with maximum specificity ever since, and transitioned to BitWarden from 1Password as well. The minor inconvenience of the lack of automation I don't mind, and in fact I like that things are separated on different services. If one goes awry, I haven't lost everything; I'm a big fan of heterogeneous systems for that reason. I think my biggest concern is actually getting a brain injury and forgetting my most important passphrases, which would add serious insult to injury.

[@bigalex7393]

Yes, your opinion about numbers would be interesting!

[@redeyesdrogon786]

this was a video i didn’t know i needed, but happy I have it. i’ll be implementing some of these tips

[@MarkJones-lr2lk]

Just wondering how secure aliasing services are, can they access your email and is this therfore a potential risk to take into account?

[@giantico]

That would be my concern as well.

[@merodiro]

@@Scranny you can't encrypt emails end-to-end between the sender and the receiver if you are using an alias. Assuming everyone is using encryption, how are they going to know your public key if you are using an alias? Also the majority of emails aren't encrypted so realistically they are going to be able to read the majority of your emails anyway

[@chrisknoblock]

Feel the same about password managers.

[@____-pb1lg]

@@chrisknoblock for password managers you can use offline and opensource ones like Keepass, and for simple logging i think you can selfhost it but i'm not sure about how hard it is

[@TheExsi]

Hey ...we need a video about number and remember. We don't all live in the US

[@D.HenriqueDeLima]

Bad

[@jondeanedits]

Thanks so much. This video brings a lot of clarity about how to do aliasing well. Much appreciated.

[@powderypastor1242]

I was looking for this recently! Thanks so much

[@subscribefornoreason542]

Yes, please make a video about aliasing phone number, shed light on some of the best services that offer this.

[@MysteriousMatt89]

Would love to see a guide on phone number aliases and what the best services are!

[@panture9561]

There is hushed and burnerapp

[@user-vn7ce5ig1z]

5:25 - I used to do this many years ago and actually had it happen a couple of times where I started getting spam in a couple of email aliases and thus knew who was responsible for selling or leaking the account information. The problem is that there's nothing you can do with that information, you can't exactly hold them accountable; the most you can do is cut that address. 🤷 But even then, it doesn't stop the extra spam-related load on the email server which still has to process and reject it all. 😕

[@bjornarsimonsen7592]

You can publicly shame them and encourage others to do the same you did. Maybe some light on the issue will help.

[@murtadha96]

Omg this video is so useful you have no idea! Fantastic stuff, thank you!!

[@samirgunic]

Your body language is so Steve Jobs! 😃Did anyone tell you that? Especially the part at 05:21 - 05:32. The index finger pointing upwards and the back of the hand facing forward, the swinging arms... you almost had me fooled. You even talk like him! 😄I didn't learn anything new here, but I enjoyed watching this video. I could listen to your presentations for hours. So I encourage you to keep up the good work. 👍 I already _alias_ everything when it comes to e-mails. So I'm like on Level 4 already. I'm in the process of reaching Level 4, I _should_ say, because it is a process... or a "journey" as you put it so elegantly, in your Steve Jobs kind of way. 😊But so is everything! Everything is a journey. Life itself is a journey. 👆There are exceptions, but as a rule, I use aliases whenever and wherever possible. I mainly use them for accounts and logins, but occasionally also for e-mailing. When it comes to your _online_ life, the most valuable journey that you can and should take, in my opinion, is knowing what accounts you have and where. Again, you describe the same idea in more elegant terms as "understanding your digital footprint". 😊So I too will emphasize step one or Level 1. That's the most important step, and most valuable part of the process. I personally lost count of how many accounts I have. I stopped counting when I reached 1000 a few years ago, but I have them all on record. All thanks to using a password manager. Sure, I am guilty of having reused passwords in the past, and for some time, I was reusing different passwords for different categories of accounts. But I also started using password managers early on, more than two decades ago now. Before it was a thing you could read a recommendation about in a PC magazine or watch a video about (KZbin didn't exist), and before you had to have (or chose to have) a multitude of online accounts (Facebook and Twitter didn't exist). The term "social media" was not coined yet, and the term "online account" was in use to describe accounts that are not on your own computer. Imagine that! Now you can hardly have a "local account" on your own computer, and the next Windows OS will probably be jacked out of your computer and confined to the fictional "cloud" that's really just someone else's computer, leaving you with a "dumb terminal" for a computer, that you will use to _stream_ the Windows OS and all your files to. All under the guise of "making your life easier". Which of course is disturbed! Talk about going a full circle in computer history! This whole idea of "everything is a subscription and you don't own anything" is disturbed. But before I go further off topic, I will stop by saying that I started using password managers a long time ago. So with time, I learned the habit of creating unique passwords, one for each account. Other than a handful of passwords, I don't know any of my passwords. That's the best kind of password, as the saying goes. Now I'm in the process of making each "username" unique, using alias e-mail addresses. The odd thing is, in the past, a "username" was just a name, a nickname. A local username on a local computer. It didn't have to be an actual e-mail address you can be contacted at in case you forget your password. The requirement for the username to be an e-mail address is a design flaw in the realm of "online accounts" and the alternate reality that's painted by the demagogy of "social media". Before "social media" happened, we had "communities" of real people having honest and open discussions about various topics. In that early version of the Internet, you could easily create an account without an e-mail address and without a phone number. If you forgot your password, and you didn't make a note of it or use a password manager for that... well, too bad for you. Unless you were good friends with the admins and ops, you had to create a new account, which was a simple process anyway, without the need to read through a long EULA where you risk agreeing to sell your soul if you accept it without reading. But the point is, usernames are meant to be unique, just like passwords. But not necessarily within the wider scope of the e-mail system or the DNS namespace. As for phone numbers, I have a handful of phone numbers I use for the purposes you described in the video. Most of them are burners and they are inexpensive where I live. It costs about 5 USD to renew each number for 12 months. I have looked at using VoIP and "virtual" phone numbers, but I don't have a setup for that yet. I found it's too complicated and expensive. Even if "virtual", phone numbers are strictly regulated. The word "virtual" in this context doesn't mean it doesn't exist. For a phone company to assign you with a "virtual" phone number, they have to reserve it in the national number plan, and make it unavailable for someone with a landline phone to use as their phone number. So it's false thinking that anything is possible because it's "virtual". Also, phone numbers are not globally portable. Unlike e-mail and the many ccTLDs that allow anyone to register, you can't be registered to a phone number of a given country as a foreign national, without any presence or connection to that country. If you live in Germany for example and you want to buy 10 Danish phone numbers for your business or for your personal use, you need to register a company in Denmark, and register those numbers on your company. Furthermore, that company is not allowed to sell or resell VoIP services with those Danish numbers to foreign nationals living elsewhere. This is why you will often find these shady "virtual number" services offered by companies registered in regions of the world where they have loose laws or government officials that turn the blind eye to this kind of practice. But again, they can't act as resellers for Danish phone numbers, but it is probably within their own right to sell out their own domestic "number capacity" to foreigners. There are some "virtual number" services for expats, such as students living in another country, but these people are entitled to that service by what it says on their passport (their citizenship). So national phone numbers are treasured, and cannot be easily exploited by marketers, spammers and criminals living abroad. At least not if you're living in a country with the rule of law. In fact, not even the ccTLDs of some countries are allowed to be used without some kind of connection to those countries. So you can't make a domain name hack with whatever ccTLD you want. It's the same story as with phone numbers. You have to have some kind of entity in that country to do so. But I think the majority of ccTLD registries are permissive in this respect. I would speculate it's because Internet happened so fast, unlike the telephone system which evolved over many decades, the countries didn't have time to react and put in the right policies and frameworks in place that would regulate the use (and abuse) of their ccTLDs. By the time they understood what the Internet was about, it was too late, and too many people and companies were already using their ccTLDs that they could not or didn't want to pull the plug and disrupt these services. So there is no equivalent or as cheap solution for _aliasing_ phone numbers as there is for e-mail addresses. Not that I'm aware of. But do tell if you know some service I can use. I am based in Europe, and it is for this reason that I cannot use BLUR for example, as it's a US company with US phone numbers. I know there are US based phone companies that can legally sell eSIM numbers to foreigners. But they are only allowed to do so for data services, because they transport everything over the Internet anyway. However, they can't do that for voice services. But within your own country borders, if you have a sweet phone service you can use for aliasing phone numbers on the cheap, that's great for you. For the time being, I think most countries of the world are living in their own little "phone number plan" bubbles from the 1970s, and global phone number portability is just not a thing yet. Even at national level, portability of mobile phone numbers was not achieved until early 2000s for most countries. In spite of traditional phone calling and texting (SMS/MMS) losing out to chat apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, etc.) 20 years later, and in spite of phone calls themselves shifting to purely data connections over the Internet (like WiFi calling). You can of course always do "roaming", if price is not an issue to you. So you could take your US phone number with you on vacation and call home from Europe for $10 a minute or something. I don't really know how much it costs, but I imagine it's not cheap. But you still need to be the rightful owner of that number. The same goes the other way around, for someone visiting the US. So as you can see it's a whole different ball of wax when it comes to phone numbers. Which is probably why there aren't many services out there that offer this. If there are any, such as BLUR for example, they are almost certainly US based, and they are very limited, with no more than 10 phone numbers (which should be plenty for most people) for which you have to pay some hefty amount each month. I bet it's cheaper to just get some prepaid burners that you can extend the validity of (or just get new ones as you need them).

[@ADITYA-zc1bd]

I'd love to have look on phone numbers and aliasing on same. Temporary emails are really easy to get. Not so much for numbers.

[@libertiwaters7199]

Techlore 4:16 : got tears on my eyes for relatability

[@gerardbertran11]

yes please do a video of phone numbers too

[@saphir8880]

Thanks for this video! I just got my self hosted SimpleLogin instance running, so this video gave me a better idea of what i can do with it.

[@RedNicole22]

Oh how I wished I had seen this video months ago and accomplished some of these ideas. My company started using the cloud and Microsoft teams, and wouldn’t you know it, we weren’t given any heads up that we HAD to share our personal email and cell phones info to work. One morning in order to access the systems I work on daily I was unable to bypass the secondary sign-ins, and was FORCED to use my personal info to work. I have been so upset by this. Now I am even more linked up and any little bit of privacy I thought I had is nullified. Big corporations is not wise to work for.

[@pauljenkins6877]

Another great and informative video.

[@BokuNoShousetsu]

Something that wasn't really addressed in this video is if you are signing up for an Amazon account, where you will have to enter your name, address, and payment/card information to receive packages. Is there any point in using an alias at that stage? Since you are already handing over so much information, are you better off using an email that can be linked to you (like a Gmail account), as it will avoid any issues with companies that try to go out of their way to block alias emails? In that case, would it be recommended to use a Gmail account for any accounts that require you to provide payment information and personal details, and use a private email account for things like social media where you will be looking to use an alias?

[@robertmartin6655]

So glad I discovered your channel! Gonna break a bottle of champagne now :D

[@TheJOCode]

100% let’s see some more research and information on phone numbers

[@beeblackblue]

quality content as always!

[@Jaymac0929]

Great information this helpful for saving your privacy.

[@kevinluna8411]

Great content and yes, a video on phone number aliasing would be awesome.

[@xxwoman]

PS: a tip for phone numbers is to get a Tracfone (just a cheap brick or flip phone. I just got an email where a flip phone is on sale for $5... normal price $10). You pretty much want a dumb phone that only does calls and texts. Get a service card and just keep up with it. You can pay for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months ahead of time and it's many times cheaper than VOIP, I think. The purpose for this phone is the sites you want to use 2fA for. Due to SIM swapping hacks, it's not a great idea to use the number connected to your smartphone where you have your apps. The best thing for 2FA is either email or an authenticator.

[@twostorystories]

Yer just the best! 🤗 💜 Thank you so much!

[@fredrickmchargen4006]

please give us the phone number tutorial!

[@jamesanderson8562]

great info. Dear @techlore , is there a way to mask URL of sites like say your facebook account in browsers or your own website to hide the original url to minimize the attack surface. Is this even possible , an alias for URLs? I hope you will make a video on that too :)

[@CoffeeMonster98]

How do I ask you a direct question?

[@techlore]

You can ask us the question here if you'd like! However, if it's a technical question we will give you links to our communities as we have time constraints and are unable to answer every single technical question that comes into our comment section. - S

[@chrishansenbiz]

You can get phone numbers with voice and SMS forwarding for $1 a month from twilio and similar providers. Ordering and config of a new number only takes a few minutes.

[@shanetravel]

details please?..

[@chrishansenbiz]

@@shanetravel Go to twilio.com and setup an account. Ordering phone numbers and setting them up is done in the programmable voice section of the web console. Besides using it to alias your communications, you can provide call tracking on lead generation ad campaigns for local businesses and make fat recurring income.

[@unwrittenunifier2617]

Unfortunately, Twilio service can not handle receiving short code messages

[@John.Doe-OG]

8:48 (that is soley for my reference)

[@dgd947a15fl]

Tip: If you can't contain the spread of data, at least come up with creative ways to corrupt the data being gathered about you.

[@little-wytch]

My dude... if you want the ultimate privacy, you forgot to mention Hardcore mode, aka Qubes OS. If you can afford to have 2 computers, have one big beefy computer for your games and the social media accounts that society expects you to have, but don't post or expose private info on those accounts. Then have a laptop to run Qubes OS for all your compartmentalization needs, such as a VM Qube for your true personal stuff, one for your work and/or school stuff, a non-internet-connected "vault" Qube encrypted and storing your passwords (with a local password manager if you wish) and all the disposable VMs you could ever wish for lol.

[@mohamedaliii8140]

Is blur opensource

[@thirumal6298]

I2p explain please 🙏🙏🙏

[@durschfalltv7505]

No umba plz

[@durschfalltv7505]

Ivwabt Numbers see

[@cq33xx58]

This is complicated, I just want to use the internet. Can you all please go offline, I want to be by myself for awhile

[@Ballistik-Knight]

Maybe some ideas about what names or handle to choose? I have bad imagination but if you choose something like pornhub-Pete or bitcoin-Bill that already tells a lot about you as a person, right?

[@John.Doe-OG]

1:03

[@mrdontmessaround2704]

Review foe Anonaddy

[@ant7936]

Is there something wrong with your voice? I didn't think so. So WHY that awful muzak??

[@gregwalker1536]

😉🤗👍☯️⚔️🕊️🙏♎

[@weshela-in-chief]

237th

[@doubledickdude8866]

aah

[@gost]

Ultimate Guide without naming services? Thank you, no.

[@emailalexdossantos]

I would love to see a video on numbers, thanks!

[@daddy_1453]

You should make a video covering Apples aliasing service

[@tcideh4929]

SimpleLogin is an amazing service that is easy to use and always works for me. Cant recommend enough. (Paid) I make a new alias for every service and have 5 email address. 1 for spam/general, the majority of my alias are directed to this email. 2 my personal email, I only have an alias for my university tied to this one. 3. My steam email. I have a couple of alias for game services for this one. 4. My business email. I have alias for this one for crypto exchanges and the like. You gotta use a password manager with this many alias though. It would be hell without Bitwarden.

[@Perifangs]

what kind of email domains you use per category? I'm at lost trying to figure out what ones to make.

[@MGRay-xq8eh]

A way to use categories and still have a unique email address per service : wildcard aliases on your own domain name. This gives something like [e-mail] and you just need to drop the *-spamtag alias to get rid of all thoses services at once while still knowing which spam comes from which service while the alias is active. Combined with randomly generated passwords stored in a password manager, it will also protect you from any data leak as long as the leak does not involve a unique phone number or other personal data.

[@btno222]

Id.me