How can I change settings to hide all personal information?

My real name, age and location show up in lists with every group and I don't want this. Do I have to quit all groups to avoid having this information private?How can I change settings to hide all personal information?
No you just don't type in your real private information, you are the one putting it there.How can I change settings to hide all personal information?
Some software requires name, serial number, address, mother's maiden name, and a lot of other stuff it has no need to know, or it won't install at all. If you lie to it, contacting its technical support for that software may cause some trouble as they may balk because the installation doesn't match your details. Otherwise, I endorse the idea of not telling 'em anything. Just encourages 'em.



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operating system insecurity



If you're running Windows, or Windows applications, your problem is bigger. They share such information, so if the operating system knows, so does Word, and Outlook, and Internet Explorer, and so on. And, since Windows and its applications have a long history of a variety of security breaches, any personal information known to them is more than usually at risk of loss to malicious software (eg, viruses, spyware, Trojan Horses, worms, ...).



It is unwise to store any personal information at all on a computer running any single user operating system. This includes all versions of DOS and Windows (until Windows NT), Apple OS (until OS X), CP/M-80, etc. The reason is that all files and information on such systems are open to inspection by any user. There are no ways to tag files, or the information in them, as belonging to a particular user. And so all files are 'common property' in effect. In fact, even Windows NT (and 2000 and the rest) are just as vulnerable when they're set up to use the FAT file system. This is what DOS and earlier versions of Windows used, and it's usable from Windows NT and later for compatibility reasons. But anything stored on a FAT file system (floppy, thumbdrive, MP3 widget, etc) will be available to anyone who has access to the floppy, etc.



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configuration



But just using a proper multi-user operating system, like Window NT or its successors, or Unix (Linux, BSD, Unix, Solaris, Apple's OS X, etc) is not enough. They must be properly configured, which varies with the environment. Such a machine in a big business environment has very different configuration requirements than does one in a family situation.



It is unlikely that any canned configuration (supplied by the vendor and chosen by checking one of three or four boxes sometime during the installation) will be a good fit to your particular circumstances. And even if it is (by some exotic chance) finding out that it is will require someone to learn something about the system's configuration options. This is almost certainly going to make someone spend some time on it. Which will be a nuisance for some systems from some vendors. Of the readily available operating systems, Linux is the most profusely documented; in fact, it's the most documented software in computing history. The sources section contains some suggestions. For Windows, it will probably be necessary to buy one of the after market books, as Microsoft rarely supplies manuals with its operating systems anymore. Your hardware vendor may do better, but you should check before buying lest your assumptions not match their reality.



And, of course, any machine (single user OS or not) which is attached to the Internet or which has outside software and data loaded onto it must be protected from viruses, spyware, and other such malicious software. The anti-virus programs (I like F-secure in part because they were the first to add the Sony-BMG CD rootkit software to their malicious software list; Norton, McAfee, and the rest were much slower and, the last I looked, some had not yet done so) and the firewall programs, and the spam filter programs and ... must also be configured correctly for their situation.