We work so hard to keep our real names and location offline; managing each other’s contact profiles has to become a big part of that.
Are you protecting your Contact List like you do your passwords? I listened to two podcasts this week that made me think about this more than I usually do. Securing my contacts is one of my goals and I’ve gone analog. I went back to my written list. Definitely less convenient, but until I find a safer option, it works. I exported, printed, and deleted all my contacts in email and on my phone.
Here’s my thinking with respect to contact lists.
- I don’t want to share my contact list & messages with companies anymore.
- My friends/family will not switch to private/secure/encrypted platforms like Wire.
- My friends/family are not going to protect my contact information (without assistance).
My husband and I use Wire for messaging. Everyone else we talk to uses the phone SMS app that comes installed on phones. This year we switched to Protonmail for email accounts. No more GMail or Google calendar. We set up personal and shopping (fake) profiles. Protonmail also recently added a beta calendar. An advantage of Protonmail is end-to-end encryption, unlike Google, where your content is scanned, scraped, and sold to advertisers.
We’ve thought about ditching our phone numbers that are connected with our real names and going anon using new cell numbers, MySudo, and other anonymous applications. We know that our friends and family will add our new numbers to our old contact profiles in their Iphones and Google accounts, thereby ruining all our efforts to hide from Big Data. So we understand that those numbers are associated with our real names.
I just don’t want to share our PII involuntarily with companies. Why worry about that? There are plenty of ways our names and associated numbers and accounts can find their way to a Google search result. Whether it’s a breach, leak, or shared with an application, companies have less desire and ability to secure your information than they imply. Those breaches or leaks are sold, shared, and posted all over the internet for advertisers, scam artists, and identity thieves. Our PII is digital gold.
We’re developing a strategy to continue stepping back from Big Data online. The first part was using a VPN for all online activity. Next, Protonmail to de-Google our email and calendars. All our junk mail and online purchases are addressed to our alternate/business name. We use MySudo phone numbers when we set up new accounts. All our loyalty cards are in random phone numbers. One day, we’ll drop our old cell numbers and go with an anonymous Mint mobile phone with no plan. If we switch the old numbers to Google Voice, they’ll never be reassigned and we can be alerted to calls and texts. We’ll share the new numbers with the bare minimum– new contact in their phone with a fake name.
Many friends and family *don’t understand* our need for privacy or why we go to such lengths. It’s a chore, for sure. We want to keep our lives off the internet to the greatest extent possible for everyone’s safety and privacy. We work very hard at this. Other people can easily thwart our efforts if they don’t take the same precautions. So how do we convince them? Another post topic…
Now Hide Me 