In 2009 I read an excellent article in Wired where journalist Evan Ratliff tried to “vanish” and stay hidden for a month. In case you haven’t read it I really recommend you do, you can find the article over here. In short he offered $5.000 of his own money to whoever found him within a month. To make it a little bit more difficult he had to do certain things at given times, to give his followers an opportunity to catch up, and his office let out clues now and then of his whereabouts and/or actions.
It was a good read indeed and I kept it in my head for quite some time afterwards, both regarding the learnings of how Social Media was used to find and/or track someone, but also I started asking myself what “traces” I leave behind from my online activities. I had all but forgotten about it when I saw a BBC programme on TV the other night, where journalist David Bond, who was very concerned about all un-necessary data collection happening in various places in his daily life, tries to stay “off the grid” for a month. To complicate it somewhat for himself he had also hired two private investigators to find him.
During the show, when David is doing his background research on things, he orders whatever data the (UK) government has on him, what private companies has on him etc. After a while he had gotten 123 replies, each containing a dossier of the data the various companies/instances kept on him. Loads. The pile for commercial companies was the largest, though all of them were rather big.
What about your data?
Now, if that is setting the scene somewhat, I have started thinking a little bit more about what data we actually leave behind us. Not only is it personal data (telephone numbers, address, birthdays etc), but as the online world is changing right now, we are also leaving quite a lot of “meta data” behind us, which, if someone really wanted to, could be used to draw conclusions about us, what we think, who we like (and don’t like) etc. I am thinking of Google(+), I am thinking of Facebook etc, as we are enticed to plonk people into groups/circles that carry a special meaning to us. It might sound innocent enough, and “we trust them” to not mis-use our information…or do we? Or is it ignorance on our part?
Now, those mentioned services sit on data predominantly regarding you and your interaction with their service, and as you know (the faces of) Mark, Sergey and Larry, you feel safe, right? So what happens if you connect it all via services such as Klout or my latest entertainment, Empire Avenue (those two are just examples, really)? Services that are built on the fact that you share with them whatever you are doing in any of your other networks? What is your data trail there? What conclusions can be drawn from it? How do you know they will not be selling it to the highest bidder 3 years from now?
Who do we trust already today?
A tweet this week (by Chris Heilmann) also highlighted this question, based on that hacker group Anonymous had been banned from Google+ and that they, Anonymous, were going to start up their own social network. The tweet in question said: “So Anonymous are working on an own social network… Would you join that with your real data?” which made me think “No” rather instinctively. It was however followed by the trail of thought above: what do I, or anyone really, know about the creators of various networks/services/apps where we happily part with most things about our lives? How do I know they are not “worse” than Anonymous (who basically are objecting to censorship)?
Now, being a developer, social media active, interactive marketing person and pretty much anything digital, on a professional level, and taking pride in once having asked for the title “Digital McGyver” during a job interview, I obviously like that small garage outfits can come out with new ground breaking services that are awesome, really cool and solves a bunch of old problems in new ways, and I really wouldn’t want it all to be owned by large global corporations, who would struggle with being fast enough or flexible enough to act on time. However, it has made me think a little bit about what data I part with, where I part with it, and how it can be combined with other data I might have parted with.
Not bovvered?
Are you concerned about these things at all? Or are you just trusting whatever service you use to behave correctly, now and for the future? Or are you only seeing benefits with the fact that Amazon knowing everything about your movements on their site so they can suggest stuff that you are more likely to be interested in? Are you blasting out your holiday plans on all networks you are on, letting the world know how awesome you find your current trip to New York is (which means your home is…well, alone…)? Do you trust that your Internet Service Provider will not change your billing based on where you surf?
If you are not at all concerned, try googling yourself to see what comes back. After that you can try different services such as beenverified.com (US only), 192.com (UK only) or Ratsit.se (Sweden only) to see what they will tell you, or for that matter you might be surprised by how much info that can be found by almost anyone if you have a car. If you are in Sweden you can try this link to Transportstyrelsen. If they will tell you those things they might tell me those things, and I might find a small fee to not be a too large fee. Would you like me to find that info? Now, what if I start up a service that you start using (say a Facebook app/game called Farmville, or MafiaWars, and I ask for pretty much full access to your user account)?
As you notice this blog post doesn’t have a conclusion, or a specific type of advice, just some random thoughts that crop up now and then when I least expect it. Just saying: be careful out there, and scrutinize anyone who wants information from you, about you. Especially be on the look out for what the combined knowledge of your various data can do to you, and what the picture will look like if you overlay all the publicly available data about you.