30 Steps To Become Invisible Online

A handy checklist for the digital resistance

JJ Luna, Lanzarote 1972, photo from his website

J.J. Luna became invisible in 1959.

That year, the writer sold his outdoor advertising business in the US Midwest and moved his family to the Canary Islands.

Throughout the 1960s, he secretly worked in underground activities that were illegal under Franco’s fascist regime. While many of his friends and associates ended up in jail or got deported, Luna never got caught.

Since the end of that regime, Luna has been making a living off consulting people on privacy and security matters. These days, he consults only by phone and e-mail. He is over 90 by now.

For $149 per year, he will still provide you with a ghost address in Wyoming. For an additional $199, he will also set up a dummy LLC company for you.

He has written a successful book called How to Be Invisible, which inspired this post.

Luna has a clear opinion on the internet – he thinks we should avoid it, and use an anonymous dumbphone or a pager for communication instead.

I realize this might sound a little far-fetched to you.

But he clearly has a point. As soon as we’re using the internet, writing an e-mail or logging into our social media accounts, we leave traces, and these traces can be used against us. We could get harrassed or stalked, or fall victim to an unlawful investigation. At the very least, corporations will collect, use, and sell every piece of consumer behavior data they can extract from us. That system is called surveillance capitalism, and it’s very real.

This is why I do believe in concepts like data autonomy (all data should belong to the person that produces it) and data minimalism (services should collect as little data as possible).

I have been studying books, magazines and blogs on these matters for years – not just Luna’s rather extreme writings.

From various sources listed at the bottom of the post, I assembled the following 30-step list. It first appeared in my book Zen Style, but I translated and updated it for this post. Most of this advice is relatively basic – but it might be helpful to have it in a handy checklist.

The CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, said many years ago: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

But I don’t believe we just need to ‘get over it’.

We also don’t need to stop using the internet and throw away our smartphone.

At the very least we can make it just a tiny bit more difficult for bad actors to hack us and greedy corporations to track us.

Here are my 30 steps to become invisible (online):