Using Proxies to Create Different Digital Identities
Imagine you find a great money making opportunity online. Perhaps using a social media site or a classified directory. All you had to do was to post a link or two and you’d get guaranteed sales and income every single time. However each time this was time limited so the income dropped after the initial sales.
It’s a very common scenario, all across the internet there are many opportunities like this online. Businesses, marketers and individuals can see the potential and want some of the action, but there’s a problem. Most of these platforms allow you to reach a huge audience, yet are not impressed with commercial activity. You can post the odd link and provide some value with it, but then that’s it. Try and keep posting and you’ll be blocked or worse your account will be deleted.
Of course, this is a problem for those who have products and businesses to promote regularly. On many popular social platforms for example any promotional activity is severely restricted and even very old and large accounts get removed regularly. Yet obviously for many of us the reward is worth the risk, indeed many businesses simply wouldn’t exist without using this means of promotion.
We Need More Than One Digital Identity
It was inevitable really, the reality is that if you use a single online account for anything then there’s a risk. In real life a business or single identity cannot be removed but in the digital world it’s entirely possible,
Imagine this dilemma –
You have an Instagram account with several million followers. It’s incredibly popular and if you post some sort of advert or recommendation it can make you a lot of money. However every time that you do post like this then you’re risking your account being banned or deleted.
Do You Post Commercial posts or not?
Obviously if it’s your main occupation then you need to create money to live. Yet how many other businesses can literally be destroyed in a minute by a click of a button. Not many I suspect but that’s exactly the risk you take, is the reward worth it. Could you face losing a resource that has taken years to create.
Spread the Risk and Minimize the Impact
It’s hardly surprising that people and businesses look for ways to reduce the risk of this scenario. One of the obvious options is to create and operate several accounts so you can spread the risk. Having multiple accounts on the same platform means you can post commercial opportunities less often and if you do get unlucky then the impact is reduced.
You can’t however sit at your home or office computer and create and manage multiple accounts either. This activity is just as likely to get you banned as well as the majority of platforms don’t allow this level of multiple accounts either.
The solution is to hide your identity and pretend that every account is linked to a different person or organisation. If you do this your identity is hidden and your risk is massively reduced.
The most basic aspect that you need to cover is that of your network IP address. This is the metric that most websites use to identify who’s connecting. It’s used to track, monitor and control access to their sites. It’s also why you simply can’t just connect and operate multiple accounts if they’re made with the same network connection then this will be identified straight away.
Using Proxies to Create New Identities
A proxy server is simply a way of hiding your real IP address and using a custom one. Most proxy services now come with a method to switch on demand or automatically between different addresses. This throws away the restriction on just having a single IP address linked to a each account.
If the proxies are configured properly they will not be detected as long as other options are covered. The IP addresses which the proxies use are important to, they should ideally not be identifiable as from a datacenter. The best proxies use addresses from specific ranges for example residential IP addresses or even proxies with mobile addresses.
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