Using online services can sometimes feel invasive. You can be shopping, signing up for events, or simply making a new account when you get to the step asking you to provide your full name (with a mandatory last name field), home or company address, and phone number. Once you’ve given up this information, it’s out of your hands — but if the service provider mishandles it, you have to bear the consequences of your data being compromised. To help you stay safe online and protect your personal information, NordPass brings you Identity Masking, available for Premium, Family, and Business users. Let’s take a look at how this feature works.
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Using online services can sometimes feel invasive. You can be shopping, signing up for events, or simply making a new account when you get to the step asking you to provide your full name (with a mandatory last name field), home or company address, and phone number. Once you’ve given up this information, it’s out of your hands — but if the service provider mishandles it, you have to bear the consequences of your data being compromised. To help you stay safe online and protect your personal information, NordPass brings you Identity Masking, available for Premium, Family, and Business users. Let’s take a look at how this feature works.
What is Identity Masking?
Identity Masking is a NordPass feature that lets users generate synthetic yet usable personal details they can input into potentially low-trust services to protect their real identities. With Identity Masking, users can generate names, home addresses, and email addresses (powered by Email Masking).
Use generated details on websites, apps, newsletters, and sign-up forms that ask for extensive personal information but don’t require identity verification and seem to have weak data protection practices. The details are generated to look like a convincing name or address without enabling impersonation or fraud. So if you choose to create an identity mask, you won’t use the identity of another real person.
Through security products like NordVPN and NordPass, Nord Security has long been committed to helping users protect their personal data online. Since launching Email Masking in 2024, the NordPass team has received numerous requests to introduce protection for more personal data. By expanding the personal data masking and protection scope, we can help users reduce the risk of data exposure.
How does Identity Masking protect individual data?
Extensive personal data collection has been a massive data privacy problem online for a while. Websites add mandatory fields requiring users to submit their sensitive, personally identifiable information without the ability to opt out. This demand forces users to decide whether they want to access a service or risk the safety of their data. If the platform then mishandles this data or is impacted by a breach, the user can feel helpless when their data is compromised.
Identity theft incidents are a huge cybersecurity risk for all users. According to research into major database leaks, the number of large-scale incidents has gone down, but the cases themselves involve significantly bigger data units, prioritizing data quality over quantity. Of the top five biggest data breaches in 2025, all involved combinations of personal information, like dates of birth, names, email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers.
Identity Masking provides users with a lightweight privacy protection feature that lets them easily meet the requirements of online forms without oversharing their personal details. Users can enter masked data to sign up for newsletters, forums, loyalty programs, low-trust apps, and other services that demand more extensive information than just a username and a password. It helps limit cross-site tracking, prevents data brokers from matching the masked data to users’ existing information, and makes it harder to build a unified consumer profile, which is usually sold for profit or used to push targeted ads.
How does Identity Masking help organizations?
Sharing personal information on vulnerable websites can also impact organizations. Employees sometimes need to access services for free software trials, low-trust external tools, or collaborations with third-party partners, which can require them to provide extensive information. If the compromised data is related to the workplace, for example, through the employee’s email address, it can create a significant security risk for the company as a whole.
Generating masked personal details lets teams access unverified resources more securely, test third-party products via free trials, and keep their personal and employment information private. It also reduces the likelihood of less tech-savvy users accidentally exposing real sensitive data to vulnerable platforms and helps promote safer information management. For instance, a team can set up a single masked identity and share it securely with each other on NordPass without relying on unencrypted tools.
How does Identity Masking work?
Both Premium and Business users can create identity masks using the NordPass browser extension, desktop, and mobile apps. They can select to create either a male or a female name and pick from one of 12 locations for the address, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, and the UK. The information will look coherent enough to appear real, but it is deliberately engineered to prevent impersonation.
To generate an identity mask, you need to:
Open the NordPass app or browser extension.
In the “Contact Info” tab, select “Create new item.”
Then, select “Generate identity mask.”
You can use the generated preset or adjust the gender and location preferences.
Select “Save” to finish the setup.
If you don’t have any identity masks in your vault and are filling in a new form or adding contact information, you can generate a mask using autofill. To do this, simply select “Fill contact info” as you’re adding information in the fields. The feature will identify relevant fields and match masked information accordingly. Once you’ve set up the mask, you’ll find it under the Contact Info tab of your vault.
If you decide to create an email mask using this feature, it will count toward the overall limit of email masks you can create using NordPass, both via Identity Masking and Email Masking. However, you can create an unlimited number of identity masks using the other information fields. Disclaimer: By activating the Identity Masking tool, you acknowledge that your verified email address and personal identity number will be processed to operate the masking service, and that you've read and understood our Privacy Policy. You can turn off this tool or delete an email mask at any time.
Keep your personal data protected with NordPass
With Identity Masking, NordPass lets you manage your identity online more proactively, keeping your private information protected from unexpected exposure and malicious attacks as well as adding a valuable feature to both Premium and Business users’ cybersecurity toolkit.
You can set up your first identity mask now with the NordPass Premium, Family, or Business plan. You’ll also get access to additional cybersecurity features for individuals and businesses, like the Data Breach Scanner, which tracks the dark web for compromised email addresses and credit card numbers, and Password Health, which identifies weak, reused, and exposed credentials. Put your data security first, both at work and at home.