Part 3: Data Aggregation

How governments and corporations aggregate data, personal data, PII, personally identifiable information, data aggregation, monetizing data

Most people operating online use the same email address or phone number (think SMS verification) to sign up for various account. This means they operate with a common set of identifying data, which in cases of most individuals is tied to our government-issued identity (we hand it over when we file a tax return or fill out almost any other form of government paperwork).

Government Agencies can aggregate your personal data into comprehensive data ‘maps’ linking your phone number, email addresses, Google Account ID, Facebook ID, Apple ID, IP (network) addresses, MAC Addresses (unique identifiers carried by all your internet enabled devices), even your bank details and phone records. But it doesn’t stop there. In this interconnected online world your data and its connection to you is in a constant dance with that of others with whom you connect to communicate. And for those government agencies with the required security clearances, this is all accessible at the most granular level.

Yeah. So what’s the big deal?

Well here’s the deal. After you have spent enough time on your internet-enabled devices, you start to display a highly-specific and identifiable digital footprint that the machines that run Google & Co. can easily recognize. Our metadata footprints are so deeply recognizable and traceable that even if you access the internet on a brand new or borrowed machine and do not log in so you are browsing “anonymously”, Google & Co. can identify you to a level of accuracy from your metadata footprint within minutes. This is how corporations like Facebook can build profiles on users who do not even have Facebook accounts. They build these ‘shadow profiles’ from the aggregated contact and metadata of other users. Google & Co uses your shadow profile to track you around the internet even if you’ve never signed up for a Facebook or Google account.

And your friends may have unwittingly helped spin up your first shadow profile. How? Just think. Every time one of your friends sees a message from a new device or an app that says “Access Contacts?” and says yes, they share all the names and contact data of the people closest to them—including you. The giant Google & Co data machine in the cloud, aggregates, cross-references and fine tunes that contact information and pairs it with other user data, all under the auspices of ‘marketing’.

Advanced Data Aggregation lets corporate intermediaries not only predict your behavior to an unprecedented level, but to influence it for private (i.e. corporate) gain. Advanced data aggregation and its extrapolation (behavioral segmentation) often lets Google & Co. predict your future behavior more accurately than you yourself can!

Yikes! So how I can prevent or minimize this?

We have some work to do to create breaks in these unique identifiers and linkings.

The two most vulnerable points for linking directly to your personal identity are your mobile phone number and your email address. To limit this you may wish to establish both a ‘private’ mobile phone number and a ‘private’ email address.

It is important to note that you will not be able to ‘unlink’ accounts to which you have already supplied your ‘public’ email and phone number, so you can only use these techniques for the new accounts you establish. You can still use your existing accounts ‘publicly’ but because of the ‘linked’ nature of the online ecosystem they will never be truly ‘private’.

In this privacy training we do not go into detail about establishing a private phone number because how you do it varies enormously based on the country you are in. However, we can put you on the right path by suggesting you establish a ‘secondary’ private phone number.

If in your country you can purchase a pre-paid sim card without supplying ID, then this is ideal. Use it with a clean phone (previously unused by you or anyone else), ideally an older-style cellphone with no smartphone functionality. Use this phone just to receive SMS verifications, and nothing else.

Another alternative is to use a VoIP or landline number that is not associated with you personally. If you are in the US, you can register a Google Voice account from a fresh, new Gmail account not associated with your main profile. Bear in mind that if you use a pre-paid SMS number, VoIP or other service it is important to keep that number registered. If you don’t, and that phone number goes back into “the pool”, anybody else who has access to that number and its SMS system in the future will have effectively ended your ability to access securely the accounts that verify your logins by sending an SMS messages to that phone.

Bear in mind that if you give your private phone number to someone and they save that number in their contacts list with your real name and your public phone number, then these will be linked if and when a cloud or back-up service such as Apple iCloud, Google Contacts or Facebook Messenger runs on their device. Then the work you did to establish a new anonymous phone number will be for naught. The same goes for your private email address!

The whole of Module 8 is dedicated to helping you establish a private email address which you can use to sign up for most accounts online and which will be free from linking.