Welcome to Nosy Eye. Spend the next 3 minutes and 49 seconds with us and you’ll come away feeling like you can be a private investigator.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• What’s a Gray Man?

• How to run a misinformation campaign about yourself

• Action Tip of the Day

Be the Gray Man

Effective personal privacy is about being obscure. In today’s age of information, getting off the map requires a bit of effort and can introduce more issues.

Think about it this way. When you apply for a job, your future employer will look for you online and if they don’t find anything, it could raise red flags.

At the very least, it leaves them wondering. That’s just one example.

The point is that being invisible brings more attention to you. However there’s another way.

Play this scenario out. You’re on the run and need to hide quick. You’ve got the option to hide in 1 of 2 groups:

Group 1 consists of ten people. Group 2 consists of 2,000 people. Which group would be easiest to hide in?

If you said Group 2, you can smell what we’re cooking. You have a much easier time moving within a group of 2,000 people.

This is called Gray Man status—to be present without being noticeable.

How to be the Gray Man: Misinformation

To be the Gray man, you’ll need to run a misinformation campaign about yourself. Sounds spicy, we know.

You may be someone who has a lot information about them in the digital ether that would be cumbersome to remove. Or the info that’s out there is challenging to delete.

Let’s muddy the waters, so to speak. When any entity or person attempts to collect data about you, they’ll have a hard time pinning down what’s actually true.

What you’re going to do is play a game we dub One Truth and Two Lies:

1. Go to the large data marketers/brokers and input misleading info about yourself:

For example: You can use your real name, but then input a fake address and phone number

2. Use aliases for magazine subscriptions and similar services.

3. Use unique usernames between your different services and subscriptions.

Use a service like Simple Login to generate unique email addresses that get instantly forwarded to your desired inbox.

This helps you label your unique email addresses without having to manage a large number of separate emails.

4. For addresses and phone numbers: you can use those of public buildings like libraries or set up virtual numbers.

What you should not do: You should not do any of this for legal or government related responsibilities. In shorter words: do not commit fraud. 

Action Tip of the Day

We’ve been advising you to use a lot of unique credentials that serve different purposes. The simplest way to manage all of them is to use a password manager.

This way you’ll only have to memorize the credentials for super-important accounts and services.

Here are a two we’ve had good experiences with:

• KeePassXC - local password manager

• BitWarden - cloud password manager

There are many other options, of course. We advise you to research before committing. Also understand no password manager, or any privacy tool for that matter, is ever fool proof.

The strongest tool you have is your common sense. Continue strengthening it.

That's all we have for you today. There's plenty more, of course. Running a misinfo campaign on yourself can be good fun. Remember: do not commit fraud or do anything nefarious with this newfound power. 

If you’d like more information or clarification, just respond to this email with “Pass it over.”

Anyways, bye for now.

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is strictly educational. Please do not use easily identifiable data online, as you do not know who is going to give it away