Social Media Can Help You Fake Your Own Death 146
Julie188 writes "We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy. But Frank Ahearn, the so-called 'Dear Abby' of disappearing, is attempting to show folks how to use those same technologies to regain your privacy, even helping you go as far as faking your own death. Ahearn is a professional skip-tracer who has hunted down people like Monica Lewinsky. In an interview with Ahearn on Network World, he says, 'One can legally disappear through the use of corporations and offshore corporations. The idea is to embrace technology and to become a virtual entity.' My favorite tip is that New Zealand is the place to land once you leap off the grid. Not only is it far from most of the rest of the English speaking world, he says, but it also has great beaches."
Re:Meanwhile, here in New Zealand... (Score:5, Informative)
Well to be fair he's a nutter, part of a right wing party that seems to have jumped the shark at this point, he was the proponent of our '3 strikes' legislation - when this was announced in parliament today there were shouts of "strike two".
The main reason why the government started doing that in 2005 was because we had discovered that Israeli spies had been doing exactly that thing, getting fake NZ passports using the birth certificates of dead babies - the police went back through the records to hunt down any such passports, to cancel them to protect our citizens traveling abroad.
You hide in crowds not underpopulated countries. (Score:2, Informative)
NZ may be a great place to end up but it has a first-world intelligence and police service with very good databases. The French military naively thought they could wander round NZ in the '80s with no one noticing but just about every step these secret agents took was remembered, videotaped and documented by sticky-nosed busy-bodies. The best place to hide is in a crowd and with NZ being so underpopulated, strangers stick out.
Re:You hide in crowds not underpopulated countries (Score:1, Informative)
NZ may be a great place to end up but it has a first-world intelligence and police service with very good databases.
Oblig. Tui ad "Yeah, right!"
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/politics/4124806/Inquiry-into-SIS-role
Re:And if you want to be dead (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Destination (Score:2, Informative)
Meeheheheeehhh, that's a shaky plan.
Suck it up, pussy.
We don't just have earthquakes [wikipedia.org] you know, we also have volcanoes [wikipedia.org], tsunamis [wikipedia.org] and the occasional strong breeze [wikipedia.org]. I'd stay away if I were you.
Re:Meanwhile, here in New Zealand... (Score:1, Informative)
To clarify, he was behind the "3 strikes violent crimes GOTO jail" and not the "3 strikes copyright infringement GOTO dark ages"
Re:Facebook could do it all (Score:3, Informative)
Lord_of_the_nerf likes Schick Razors and Warm Baths
You might have better luck with Dovo.
Re:Damnit (Score:3, Informative)
Funniest thing about this comment is people think it's funny.
Re:Not Australia (Score:2, Informative)