GoKawiilShort answer: for most people, no. Planting fake jobs, cities, and life details all over the web is a weak default. It rarely wins against systems that ingest public records, commercial data, and whatever you already leaked. It can confuse you on recovery questions, create collateral hassle, and still leave the real trail intact.
The idea is easy to sympathize with. Privacy guides and OSINT-minded writers sometimes suggest muddying the water so data brokers and search aggregators end up with a mess instead of a clean dossier. Michael Bazzell’s Extreme Privacy line of thinking is one place that mindset shows up. The instinct is not silly. The execution usually is, unless your threat model is narrow and you treat deception as a small, controlled tactic.
To decide what is worth doing, it helps to separate three things people blur together:
Pseudonyms and compartments (different name or handle, different email, keep those worlds from touching). Broad fake personal facts (invented employers, cities, birthdays sprinkled across profiles and forums). Targeted decoys (honeytokens and canaries that fire when someone touches something they should not).
(1) and (3) often make sense. (2) is what this article argues against as a default lifestyle.
What “red herrings” usually means here
People mean: leave enough false trails that an automated profile or an amateur OSINT sweep picks up noise instead of signal. Maybe a fake hometown on an old forum, a junk LinkedIn-adjacent crumb, or made-up “about me” text somewhere indexable.
The imagined adversary is often a people-search site, a marketer’s graph, or a stranger with Google and patience.
The appeal
Real dossiers are built from scraps. The Federal Trade Commission explains that people-search companies compile reports from other brokers, public social posts, and government public records. Starting from something small (a name or phone), a buyer can get a report with age, past addresses, associates, and more.
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