How to Disappear: Secrets of the World's Greatest Privacy Experts

An Atlantic Ideas piece on the small industry of "extreme-privacy consultants" who, for a substantial fee, will scrub their clients off the internet — removing them from data brokers, untangling them from public records, restructuring their digital and physical lives so they become very hard to find. The essay sits inside the broader cultural moment of doxing, AI-driven identification, and surveillance capitalism, and asks what the existence of this service tells us about the privacy that ordinary Americans no longer have. Note: Atlantic blocked direct fetching.