The WIRED Guide to Digital Opsec for Teens

Expand your mind, man. Opsec is really about time travel — taking small precautions now before disaster strikes later. If you’re not in auto-delete mode, your explosive emotional text exchange with the person you’re currently dating — or, importantly, the photos you sent each other — will last forever. It’s normal for things to change and for relationships of all kinds to come and go. You may trust someone and be close to them now but drift apart in a year or two.

If you imagine a more extreme scenario where you are investigated by police, they could obtain search warrants to search your accounts or digital devices. People should do it Go the extra mile To maintain their operations if they are trying to hide the activity from law enforcement. To be clear, this guide definitely does not encourage you to commit crimes. Don’t do crimes! The point is just to understand the value of keeping basic operational principles in mind, because if some of your digital information is disclosed randomly or out of context, that could, in theory, seem incriminating.

You probably intuitively understand a lot of this. Don’t give out your password to your friends, duh.) So this guide will go beyond the pretty obvious and emphasize the more subtle, unintended consequences of failing to practice good operations.

Opsec failures are memorable

“Signal Gate” 2025: US officials discussed war plans in a group chat on the mainstream secure messaging app signal. Then they accidentally added a journalist to the chat. Later, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth famously (awkwardly) sent a message to the chat: “We are now clean on OPSEC.” At least some of the chat members were too Potentially used A A modified and insecure version of Signal. Everything is very dirty on opsec.

Gmail drafts reveal, 2012: Then-CIA Director David Petraeus and his mistress shared a Gmail account to hide their communications by leaving them for each other to see as draft messages. This was kind of ingenious considering this was before most texting or messaging apps offered temporary or ephemeral messages, but the FBI figured out the strategy.

Identities

Opsec is all about partitioning, and that’s the hardest part. Failures in segmentation are often how criminals are caught or how information that was supposed to remain confidential is revealed. Think of your online life like rooms in a house. Each room has a separate key. If someone breaks into one room, they can grab everything there, but you don’t want them to be able to run out of that room.

You can have multiple identities online and divide up the activities of each, but maintaining separation requires careful thought. There’s the real you who uses your main Gmail or Apple ID for personal and family things, social accounts where you use your real name, as well as school and perhaps work. Another compartment is your school email and school file storage. Then there are your more adaptable online personalities who may have semi-anonymous handles, like Jane Doe’s jnd03. Friends know that these accounts are yours and your classmates may be able to guess them. Finally, there may be a pseudonym: alternate accounts that have no clear link to your real person, such as Jane Doe who uses the handles “_aksdi0_0” or “peter_mayfield01.”

Separation rules

You have accounts under your real name, but you may also need accounts under pseudonyms. Tight partitioning will prevent people from defaming your borrowed accounts. But that is easier said than done.

Obviously don’t recycle usernames across platforms. If JaneD03 is your Instagram account, do not use it or a name similar to your anonymous Reddit account. Don’t even reuse passwords, but especially don’t reuse passwords between real and fake accounts. To prevent a hacked alias from revealing your name, do not use your primary email address; Instead, use a unique alias. Gmail “bullet tricks” (@jane.doe, @j.ane.doe) don’t count, because they all equally reveal your main account.