Social media

You run accounts for clients, or several brands of your own. Signing in is the small part of the problem.

Platforms match accounts by the device that opens them and by the network they arrive from. Two accounts opened in one browser share both.

Each of the usual answers cuts one link and leaves the others. A platform only needs the ones left.

Two accounts that have traded one shared thing for another are still two accounts that can be joined.

A profile is a separate browser with a separate data directory. Cookies, local storage, service workers, the cache and saved logins live there and nowhere else.

Six things belong to the profile rather than to the computer it runs on.

• Its own data directory

  Cookies, storage, cache and saved logins stay in one folder per profile and are never shared.

• Its own device

  Derived at launch from the template, the profile id, the generation and the engine version, rather than stored.

• Its own exit

  HTTP, SOCKS5 or your own server over SSH. If it will not come up, the launch is refused instead of going out from your home address.

• Its own clock and language

  When the proxy country is known, the timezone and the language stack come from that country.

• Its own extensions

  Chosen per profile, from the built-in catalogue of 11 or by store link with the signature checked.

• Its own start page

  A local page showing the exit address, the engine version and the device the browser was actually handed.

The scenario names six platforms and loads three blocklists, 74 distinct entries after they merge. Blocking is deliberately narrow: sign-in, media and captcha hosts are left alone, because a profile that cannot log in is not a protected profile.

A platform also watches you with its own requests, from its own address, where a domain list cannot reach. Path rules reach there, and each set fires only on the hosts it belongs to.

TikTok gets less, and the table says so instead of implying otherwise. Thirteen entries in the cross-site list and its click identifier stripped, and no first-party rules, because none has been measured against it yet.

Two of the five templates are mobile. Behind them stand 22 phones and 7 tablets, one line each: screen in layout points, pixel density, the graphics string, cores, memory and the vendor's own fonts.

A profile is given one of those devices whole. One handset's screen with another's fonts is not a rare device, it is a tell.

A profile created five minutes ago, with an empty cookie jar and no history, is a signal by itself. The Cookie robot (an item in the profile menu) browses ordinary public sites inside that profile first, so the account opens in a browser that has been used before.

The pool is 30 addresses in six groups and nothing in it asks for a login. Selection and order are shuffled per profile, so two profiles do not walk the same sites in the same order.

1. 1

   Create the profile with its scenario, template and proxy

   The clock and the language follow the exit, so this is the moment that decides them.

2. 2

   Warm it before the first login

   Per site the robot opens, settles, scrolls, pauses, scrolls further and pauses again.

3. 3

   Sign in and stay inside day one

   On day one Safe pace is 40 pages, and the Safe daily ceiling section shows three posts, five DMs and one account switch.

4. 4

   Let the ramp finish

   The ceiling rises daily and reaches the full 200 on day seven. The card shows which day the profile is on.

The recommended ceiling is 200 pages a day, counted as top-level navigations in that profile's windows. The count is kept in a small file, so a restart does not lose it, and resets on the first access of a new day.

The Safe pace bar on the card turns amber from 80 percent of the ceiling and red at it, while the per-action numbers are only shown. Nothing is ever blocked: the app cannot know that your fiftieth profile view is riskier than your fifth.

The synchronizer repeats one running profile in the others, each window after a short pause of its own. You pick a master among the open profiles, then the targets that repeat it.

Use it for the mechanical half: the same navigation, the same form, the same settings change. Ten windows doing something a person would not do is that thing done ten times.

• Mirrored

  Typed addresses, clicks by CSS path or by position in the viewport, scrolling, letters, pastes and keys.

• Not mirrored

  Rich text composers without a value property, file uploads, drag and drop, hover and anything drawn on a canvas.

• The windows

  Tiled on the display your cursor is on, in a grid sized to the number of open profiles. A cell smaller than 420 by 320 points is refused and counted.