With Ovarit closing, many of us will be trying new platforms and returning to more open ones like Twitter. I posted a comment about small steps I take to help anonymize myself but since technology is part of STEM, I think there may be women who are a lot more well versed than me in that area. I am going to copy and paste a comment I had already typed to prevent having to type it again but if any of you think these methods are good (or even wrong! things are always changing and I am not an expert) I would love to hear all of your thoughts and make a space for us to focus on that over the last month we have on this site.

My comment previously:

Using Twitter can be safe if you take some precautions. or other sites.

Quick guide that isn’t foolproof but can help protect you: make a burner email on Proton, use a different device than you use for anything else. connect to public wifi if possible or if you have the Xfinity hotspot so it’s not connected to your home network. i use Surfshark as a VPN because they’re not located in the USA and supposedly will not turn over anything to authorities. I use a paid subscription to Talkatone app for burner phone numbers for my verification codes, but it’s not expensive. Make a name that is not at all related to any online name you’ve had if you want to be extra anonymous. my suggestion is how I came up with this one: pick a favorite noun or adjective and translate it into languages you don’t speak and pick one you like the sound/look of.

if you have niche hobbies you may want to avoid posting about them, or at least maybe even post about fake ones to throw off anyone who may recognize you from real life. don’t post about where you’re going or when or what time of day it is so that it makes your time zone harder to figure out, and even better if you wake up at odd times and can’t sleep, do some activity outside of your normal hours. if you really want to shake things up post about going to things you aren’t going to or near to prevent people from identifying any patterns that could align with your real social media.

There are other/more steps that can be taken, but these are the easiest ones for people who aren’t super tech savvy. if anyone else has questions or ideas on how to remain safe on other social medias, please feel free to share.

I personally like to buy random devices from pawn shops that I don’t use for my other stuff too, because that way even if they’re tracking cookies and have weird permissions that may allow them to see my other activity they don’t get much. Older devices like old iPads, Kindles etc are both much cheaper and very capable of doing basic browsing and still having apps and are just fine for only social media.