Re: Fake PII FTW.
Feh. Those who have no need to get my real PII get something from a list including various local Federal buildings (the FBI and the Federal courts tend to hang out there) or various local sheriffs’ office headquarters, or, if I’m feeling nasty, FBI HQ or Secret Service HQ in Washington. Complete with the appropriate phone numbers and the name of whoever was boss a decade or more prior but isn’t there anymore. (Certain local sheriffs aren’t available any more because they’re in prison, usually Federal prison, for being very naughty boys. And yes, they’re all boys. One local county has had two of the three prior sheriffs spend time in Club Fed.) Given that FBI HQ is located on a very famous street, one would think that using that address would be a dead giveaway. One would be wrong.
A nice throwaway email address, from Gmail or Zoho or Outlook or Hotmail or Yahoo or something is good for those kind of PII entries, too; create a throwaway with fake PII, answer their email, cancel the email. Or just abandon it and never use it again. (Some services, such as Zoho, want a phone number; there are lots of ways to generate a temporary phone number.) As I used fake info, Gmail et al can’t even complain to me. I’ve probably pissed Google off and they probably have noted my IP… except that I try to sign up from the local IHOP, using their extremely shitty wireless. Which I signed up for using a throwaway address and a spoofed MAC.
Generate a nice simple text file with the various fake PII, put the file on two or three encrypted USB sticks (NTFS EFS is good enough, and can be read by Windows, Mac, and even Linux, with the proper tools) and it’s portable, can’t easily be read by the ungodly, and keeps track of the fakes.