I generated a fake name and I am using it as a fake identity where I don't want to use my real name, like in a comment on youtube video. It's like my alter ego ;)
Messing with tech support scammers, although for that purpose the Fake Name Generator (search for it) is better because it generates addresses and credit card numbers (that pass the checksum validation) too.
Inside of companies with data protection requirements, these can be handier and more natural than censoring PII or PCI or replacing them with an encrypted string. It’s much more natural for the data science process.
That's beyond DuckDuckGo's control since that data is controlled and sent by the browser.
There are many addons for doing what you said though just look for user-agent changer or faker
If you just want to blend in with the crowd, you can use the tor browser without the tor proxy.
They have invested a lot of effort crafting its fingerprint. Now that they have moved away from Firefox ESR, it shouldn't come with much of a security penalty.
I have on occasion created pseudonyms for various purposes. One of my favorite techniques is to combine a first name common to a particular nationality with a last name common to a different nationality. E.g. a French first name with a Japanese last name. Surprisingly, such combinations occur somewhat frequently in real life.
That seems... underwhelming compared to the hundreds of services that already exist for doing this (see: any of the results given to DDG's query) and generate a much more extensive dossier.
Whenever I have a hard time finding something I am tempted to try Google. The thought of "Google is THE search engine" is still ingrained somewhere in my brain. For quite some time now, if I can't find it using DDG, Google turns out not any better (not using Cookies, not using an account that is - so no extreme search personalization) - some maybe not so obvious things I like about DDG
- it doesn't force localization as hard upon you, if you set DuckDuckGo to country xyz it seems you 'literally' get the results you would get as if you were in this country, as someone who travels frequently, or is a foreigner in a country, that is extremely nice. Besides just being insightful when doing research of course
- fewer sites are removed drom DDG's search results (we all know about takedown notices). For example in Germany there is a 'right to be forgotten', individuals can have links removed from Google if it is about them personally (unless they are a public person of interest and some other restrictions), and of course sites with copyright infringements (and yes, sometimes I am looking for some site to stream something, while I often even use yandex for that, I find sites quickly with DDG. With Google you see the notice 'sites have been removed due to copyright violations', then you can go to the lumendatabase, but there scam sites and 'legitimate' streaming sites are mixed together, so you hunt through there, it's a nightmare)
honestly don't miss Google anymore and use DDG on all my devices, but I don't want to pitch too hard. Use whatever works for you
I do this too. I try and fail to find something quick in DDG. I then try and fail to find it in google. But mentally it's hard not to chalk that up as a failure of DDG for status quo reasons.
In Muslim countries, people who switch religions to/from Christianity have to change their first names if its the name of prophet/saint in the other religion.
51 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 92.4 ms ] threadhttps://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=random+person+name+generator&i...
All data from https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/
{"status":"success","message":"OK","data":{"Name":"Robert Ignatieff","Address":"1990 Lake Floyd Circle, Gaithersburg, MD 20877","Details":{"1":"Birthday","176":"Company","39273275":"Favorite color","7acad451-3bcd-422a-8573-b320ea2a5f91":"QR Code","1999ToyotaBandeirante":"GUID","Brown":"Vehicle", <sic>}}}
https://fakeid.now.sh/api/Gender/male/NameSet/ru/Country/us
Any others?
> Based on "fake" written for MS-DOS. Unfortunately the author and publish date are unknown.
A bit intriguing...
They have invested a lot of effort crafting its fingerprint. Now that they have moved away from Firefox ESR, it shouldn't come with much of a security penalty.
Feel free to use the DB, it is in sqlite.
[0] https://lab.raed.it/php/tounsi/
https://duckduckhack.com/
That seems... underwhelming compared to the hundreds of services that already exist for doing this (see: any of the results given to DDG's query) and generate a much more extensive dossier.
Whenever I have a hard time finding something I am tempted to try Google. The thought of "Google is THE search engine" is still ingrained somewhere in my brain. For quite some time now, if I can't find it using DDG, Google turns out not any better (not using Cookies, not using an account that is - so no extreme search personalization) - some maybe not so obvious things I like about DDG
- it doesn't force localization as hard upon you, if you set DuckDuckGo to country xyz it seems you 'literally' get the results you would get as if you were in this country, as someone who travels frequently, or is a foreigner in a country, that is extremely nice. Besides just being insightful when doing research of course
- fewer sites are removed drom DDG's search results (we all know about takedown notices). For example in Germany there is a 'right to be forgotten', individuals can have links removed from Google if it is about them personally (unless they are a public person of interest and some other restrictions), and of course sites with copyright infringements (and yes, sometimes I am looking for some site to stream something, while I often even use yandex for that, I find sites quickly with DDG. With Google you see the notice 'sites have been removed due to copyright violations', then you can go to the lumendatabase, but there scam sites and 'legitimate' streaming sites are mixed together, so you hunt through there, it's a nightmare)
honestly don't miss Google anymore and use DDG on all my devices, but I don't want to pitch too hard. Use whatever works for you
Ah well. I'm a supporter.
e.g. a lot of first/last names cannot be paired together because they would belong to different religions/ethnicities.
Probably they're sticking with just Anglosaxon names where this is far less of a problem than Middle East/India ones.
I don't think so, I got "Johanna Nagata", and Nagata is apparently a Japanese surname.
There are sources (US SSN and census especially) of first and last name frequency by decade, though not so much first/last pairings. Gender also.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uuid&t=hj&ia=answer
If you like that kind of things and you dig Python, the lib "faker" (https://faker.readthedocs.io/en/master/) is a real threat:
There are many different generators, and you can even use l10n to generate names, phone numebers, plates, IP or ssn from different parts of the world.It's amazing to create test data, either for dev or teaching, and I just have it autoimported in my PYTHONSTARTUP because of it.
It also plays well with "factoryboy" (https://factoryboy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to mass generate complex data set, and even add them automatically to the database.
https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker