So back to the digital disappearing act and the things to be aware of, most of which are pretty obvious really. The first thing that you should be aware of is the digital foot print that you have, it is left behind us by the simplest of everyday actions. As to the internet or world wide web, things like visiting social media sites, even opening up a browser on a computer alerts a whole herd of people that we have gone on-line. Other technologies like mobile communications devices, your mobile phone being the most obvious will announce your presence to the world. Almost every thing we do will leave a trace somewhere, even driving along the motorway or going into a garage for fuel is likely to generate an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) request. This along with closed circuit television (CCTV) is likely to be enough for you to be identified, well at the garage at the very least. If you are carrying your mobile phone or pay by card the foot print that you leave behind just becomes bigger.
As you can see from the picture, you can produce a reasonable effort when it comes to disappearing and you have control of things. But when it is someone else that collects and analyses the data, you don’t have the option of retrospectively vanishing in the same way. So how would you actually do this, by that I mean actually disappear from view. And it would seem that it is almost impossible on first impressions, but in truth it is possible to do if you really want to. To actually do the vanishing trick, you need to understand what you are trying to avoid. If you want to hide or obfuscate the financial part of your existence, then you have to deal in cash – some thing that the banks are not too keen on. But you still have to source the cash, usually from an automatic teller machine (ATM). This obviously tells the bank that you have withdrawn the money, but not what it has been spent on. It also deprives the bank of a significant amount of valuable tracking data that they analyse and sell. In order to understand my own digital foot print I carried out the following exercise.
I have tracked as best I can my digital footprint for two separate days, during this period I have tried to faithfully record when and where I think I would have popped up on someone’s digital estate. One of the days was a leisure day, although I did travel my usual journey from a Scottish Island to Glasgow. In practice adding a lot of time to the journey, to stop and record things. The second day was a standard work day, although I did go out socially in the evening. In the next post I’ll let you know exactly what I actually recorded and how I did it, along with the things I noticed and think they will capture some information.