Raise your hand if a lot of people have your contact information.
The people closest to us can either help or harm our privacy- protection efforts. Our choices sure can generate some awkward conversations. We have to explain why we don’t use our real identity on social media and ask others not to reveal it, too. We keep a low profile: inaccurate personal details, obscured photos, and frequent periods where we’re MIA. For people we don’t know very well, their reaction is often suspicion. If we know them better, hopefully it’s more mild confusion.
Let’s think about where our data lives with other people. Everyone has a contact list of some kind. My grandmother’s was on the back page of her phone book. (Remember those?) Today, almost everybody has their list in their cell phone and email provider, minimum. For us control freaks, it’s hard to admit that we have no idea how they’re managed or secured, even though they contain our names, birthdays, contact numbers, addresses, email addresses, sizes, photos, etc… Regardless of what we do, we can’t hide from Google if our friends add our names and digits to their Google contact list.
As military families, our contact information is shared for Key Caller lists, Emergency Contact lists, spouse’s coworkers, SFRGs, and plenty of others. We have to decide what accounts and numbers should be shared with the idea that we have no control over where that PII goes after it leaves our hands.
We send invitations, holiday cards, packages, all with our names and return addresses. We receive online shipments, packages, and mail from our friends and families. At each level, the information is saved, scanned, and shared by companies and the USPS. They collect those data points and sell them to marketing companies. Yes, especially the USPS. It’s time to update our address stamps and ask everybody to send our mail to an alternative name. During each PCS, we rent our PO boxes and list our alternate name as our ‘business’. It’s worked every time.
Social media is last because it’s such a minefield. It’s hard to explain to most people why we don’t have every social media profile out there, or why none of them are in our real names. Even when we explain to family members that we want to protect them from anything negative that might happen through associations with us, the seriousness doesn’t always register. So we hop on there with an alias… and they tag us with the #nationalsisterday. *Shrugs in defeat*
I started giving books about privacy and online security for gifts hoping they’d see we’re not the only folks concerned about staying off the internet. There’s at least the author of the book, at any rate. Honestly, it’s helped some. Over the last 10 years, we’ve gradually motivated them to accept our weird lifestyle. My mother hardly bats an eye these days when I give a fake name and email to get that sweet 15% discount at Eddie Bauer. My sisters explain to people when I don’t accept friend/follow requests. There’s a hilarious hometown legend that my husband works for a secret agency. They also mail our packages to our ‘business’. We’re winning!
The last obstacle is the drop of our current phone numbers associated with our real names. One day, we’ll make the leap to no contract/anon Mint mobile service with new numbers and accounts. We’re saving it for a time when we can visit personally with most family and walk them through creating a new contact with the fake name and information. You know how most parents struggle with gadgets.
When we reach the point of thinking we’ve finished, we have to accept that the process is never really over. Companies keep developing new ways of sucking up our data and profiting from that theft. We have to accept that it’s a process that we won’t complete. Instead of worrying about Big Data creating accurate profiles for our online accounts based on our computer use, online behavior, email content, social media algorithms, etc… we give them false information, multiple profiles, and garbage, so that there is nothing useful to sell advertisers. We obscure the truth with much, much more false information. We lie about everything.
Now Hide Me 