Identity theft on the Internet is fashionable. As published in StatisticBrain, there are between 12 and 15 million victims per year, with economic losses worth around 5,000 euros per person. In media such as MakeUseOf , different ways in which it can occur are detailed. We ourselves have talked about how the lack of security in data protection takes its toll.

You can not control 100% of all potential threats, but you do want to cover your fingerprints as much as possible. Minimizing risk is the key, and for you to do so we offer you five ways to use disposable information to protect your identity on the Internet.

Names and disposable addresses

Unless necessary, never enter your real name or address on a website. You never know what could happen, but in the worst case someone can discover that information and get to you. And if that happens, you will not notice until it’s too late.

That’s why you’re interested in using a fake name and address, such as those you can get with Fake Name Generator. Through this web you can create complete identities that you can use instead of yours. The details you can enter include addresses, GPS locations, credit card numbers, work life and much more. It is quite impressive.

Use and dispose phone numbers

Suppose you just bought a new computer, and you want to sell the old one on any ad website or on eBay. On the one hand, it would be advisable to give a phone number in case a potential buyer wants to ask you something about the product. On the other hand, is it really necessary that you make it public?

Evidently, no. The best you can use is a phone number created ad-hoc, which you can undo when you no longer need it. A great option for this is Hushed Burner Number, an application available for iOS and Android that can generate phone numbers for 40 countries, which are associated with your real device and which also have their own voicemail.

Of course, it has one small drawback: it is a payment service. Account with monthly, annual subscriptions and also with payment per minute of use.

Temporary email addresses

Let’s talk about an uncomfortable truth about spam: there is no way to avoid it. When you make your email address public in some way, even to create an account in a web service, spammers can find it and fill it with advertising.

Worse yet: if spammers can find your email address, so can any malicious actor. If a hacker with bad intentions finds your email address, then you can access everything you have stored in your inbox. And as such, you can get access to a huge amount of sensitive information, especially if you use the same password everywhere.

With a temporary email address you can solve this problem. We recommend you use 10MinuteMail, which creates an inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes (although you can increase this amount of time if you need it).

User credentials to use and throw away

We used to talk about registering an account to access a service. Maybe you’re interested to know that sometimes you may not need to do it, since you can use one already created by someone and that is shared for public use. This is how BugMeNot works.

There are restrictions on what accounts can be shared : websites with paywall, sites operated by communities and banking and e-commerce. If what you are looking for does not fit into this description, then you are in luck. So you can get where you wanted with a registered account, without having to do it or expose your data.

Anonymous file sharing

If there is another thing you should keep secret, apart from your personal data, are the files you share with friends and family on the Internet. There is not much risk of someone extracting your identity from shared files (unless one of them contains something that can be used to identify you, such as photos of you), but it is a good idea to use an anonymous service to protect your privacy.

There are many hosting services that delete files after a period of time, ranging from 24 hours to 30 days and even more, but we will recommend Send Anywhere. Why? Because anything you have shared is erased as soon as the person to whom you send it is downloaded.