Transcript of The Secret Privacy Tool You’ve Never Heard Of

- Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? I wanna quit the gym when they've got your name, email, phone number, and credit card. They're not gonna let it go easily. I've been there, but instead of fighting their cancellation process, I just clicked one button and shut down the identity they had on file. They tried to charge me, but the credit card no longer worked. They emailed me some angry messages, but it no longer forwarded to my inbox. I can even imagine the gym manager shaking his fist in anger and cursing my name, but even that wasn't real. Welcome to All Things Secure. My name's Josh, and the goal of this channel is to give you simple security and practical privacy tips you can actually use. And if you want to go deeper, I've also got a free seven day email privacy course at AllThingsSecured.com/emailcourse Okay, so you've got your password managers, your VPNs, your private messenger apps and more, but there's this niche category of privacy services out there that not many people talk about. I call them pseudonym management services for SMS for short. Yes, I know that the word pseudonym starts with P, but do you really wanna compete with that acronym? Anyway, today I wanna explore this world of pseudonym services, what it is, which services do it best, and whether it's even worth your time. And you should probably stick around at the end because my answer to that last question may surprise you. Every time you sign up for something online, you're giving away the same pieces of personal data, your name, your email address, your phone number, your credit card, sometimes even your home address. The problem is, once a company has that info, you lose control. If your phone number gets on some kind of spam list, you're stuck with it or you go through that hassle of changing your number. If your credit card gets compromised, you wait for the bank to issue a new one and good luck convincing a subscription service to delete your data once they have it. So instead of handing out your real information, you give companies a pseudonym, an alternate identity that can include a different name, email, phone, or payment method. And the beauty of it is most of the time when you're done, you can just shut down that pseudonym without affecting your real accounts. Think of it like a wallet full of fake IDs, one for the gym, one for gaming, one for streaming services. Each looks and works real enough, but none of them tie back to your real identity. And yes, it's all legal as long as you're not using these pseudonyms with your bank or government or something like that. Now here's the thing. There are specific services that are designed to solve each of these issues individually. There are things like privacy.com to create virtual credit cards. Hushed for that second phone number or simple login or even apple's hide my email for email aliases. And generally speaking, I tend to promote a separation of services. I don't want Apple or some all in one privacy app to handle all of my data, but in this case, there might be value in bundling these masking services for the sake of managing pseudonyms. I mean, it's really frustrating for me whenever I've used Apple's hide my email to create an alias. And then since I don't use or recommend Apple's password app, you can learn exactly why here I actually lose track of where I've created that alias and how it's being used and it's super frustrating. So in this case, a pseudonym management service, TM that can connect an alias name, an alias email address, a secondary phone number, and a virtual payment method together as an identity could be valuable. It can also be annoying, and I'll explain that in a moment as well. I've tested three companies that really focus on this, my pseudo cloaked and iron vest. If there's one that I'm missing, please let me know in the comments. I just genuinely don't know about it. None of these companies have paid to be part of this video. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, which I wanna cover right now, but they all do basically the same thing. They create and manage pseudonyms. So let's start with payment methods. Since this is the feature that creates the most problems, I've personally used mass credit cards with all three of these services, but as of this recording only, my pseudo currently has a publicly available virtual card feature, and that's a shame because cloaked allows you to create unlimited virtual cards while my pseudo limits you to either three or nine. But cloaked is unfortunately still in beta and not available to the public yet. Similarly, iron vests shows the pay feature and the dashboard, but says that they're still working to get this feature back up and running. So my pseudo for the win in this category, I guess. And as with any such financial feature, all of them require some kind of KYC or know your customer, which means that you'll have to give my pseudo your actual name, birthdate, and home address for them to verify your identity before you can create and use a virtual card. But once you do, I'm a big fan of using virtual cars to pay for things online. Lots, lots of great benefits including card limits, merchant lock, and of course the ability to turn off a card anytime you want. Virtual phone numbers are also handled differently. My pseudo is unique in that they offer numbers for the us, Canada, and even the uk, although the UK requires extra identity verification. But again, they limit you to between one and nine different phone numbers depending on the plan you purchase. Same with iron vests, which only gives you one phone number and unfortunately they require you to connect your actual phone number to that, which honestly, I think that's unnecessary. Cloaked on the other hand, gives you unlimited phone numbers and a very unique way to use them such that you can call people using that number and even lock that number to a specific contact. I've done a full video on how this works and it really is pretty cool all that to say in this category. Cloaked is by far the best option, but they all offer some kind of secondary phone number. Finally, we come to email aliases, and again, they each approach this differently. For some odd reason, my pseudo limits you to only three or nine aliases. Again, depending on the plan you choose, which is really dumb considering how easy it is to generate unlimited aliases. Iron investing cloaked are two of them, which both do that. They offer unlimited aliases that you can generate for each identity that you create. Now, beyond this, each of these pseudonym management services try to differentiate themselves on different points. Cloaked includes a data removal service and A VPN. My pseudo has private browsers and encrypted communication between my pseudo users and Ivest has this unique way to integrate biometrics into their app security. These features are great in all, but I believe that these extra bells and whistles are just a way to distract us from the most important question we're now going to answer is a pseudonym management service even necessary. I told you before that I generally don't like all in one solutions. I don't want my internet browser to also be a password manager and a VPN provider and a secure messaging app. I don't know. I want them to excel at what they were designed for and to resist the urge to be everything for everyone. But in some cases, there are complimentary services that fit well together without requiring extra trust. For example, my preferred password manager, proton Pass not only creates and stores passwords, it also creates email aliases. Now these are two different but complimentary services, and while I could engage with two different software solutions to do this, it really just makes sense to combine both of them. So is it worth combining the ability to mask email, phone, and pay services into a single privacy app? In theory, I would say yes, but in practice it just hasn't worked that way for me. You see services like Iron Invest in Cloaked also want to be your password manager, which means they're competing with the tools that I already use. And when I had both installed, they were constantly clashing who auto fills this box, the password manager or the pseudonym service. So if you don't currently have a password manager, those might work well for you. I do also see a lot of value in how Cloak creates masked phone numbers. It's really cool, but you can't pay for that feature by itself, so it's kind of a take it or leave it deal. And that leaves us with my pseudo, which is purposely designed to give you only a few pseudonyms instead of unlimited options. You don't create these aliases on the fly. It's an alternate name, email and phone number that you could potentially memorize and use in person. And this is definitely useful, especially when you pair this with virtual credit cards. But this requires you to create a kind of subcategory in your mind. You use your password manager to manage all of your logins, but under that you have these handful of alternate identities that you pull out in certain uses. I don't know. I mean at this point, my pseudo is the only one that makes sense to me as being, although once cloak releases their virtual card product to the public, that might be the one that I would choose instead. Well, a quick update, perhaps I spoke too soon. My pseudo has decided to lock my account saying that I went against their terms of service using the app outside of the United States, which in this day and age I think is absolutely ridiculous that any software company geo restricts their services when I am a US citizen transacting and doing all of this using their services in the US even though I may live or travel abroad. So just know that if you are a my pseudo user and you are traveling at all, do not open your app or else they may lock you out as well. I think this kind of brings me to my final thoughts on these type of services anyway, but for me, honestly, I don't use any of them on a daily basis because I'm comfortable using Proton Pass, hushed and privacy.com as three separate services to accomplish basically the same thing. I'll say it again. I believe in a separation of privacy powers. No one app should be trusted with all of my data or to provide me with all of my privacy services, but that's what I think. What do you think? Leave a comment with your setup below. And if you'd like to learn more about creating better privacy and security in your digital life, join our free seven day email course that offers a strategic layered approach that you won't find anywhere else.