The Era of shouting out your PRIVACY loud

Disclaimer: No one particular person’s privacy or data was compromised for conducting the research to support this article.

Personalization or better put Ad-personalization might sound familiar. We are progressing into a time period where big corporates and even petty Ad-engines want to get personal with you, but why? They want to be with me and hold my hands all along the crest and trough of my life, I doubt even my girlfriend won’t be that interested in me (if only I had one!!). Jokes apart!! Personalization lets these computing engines get their hands on our lives and the data constituting ours’. And we humans or rather the blind ones just give it away for free. These computers feed on them without moving a muscle. All they do is, rely on personalization for their success.

For the sake of understanding, let me show you an example of how easy it was to get the address of a person without them knowing. All you need to know about the person is just the level one of personalization. Their name and one other identifying detail. Do you only have the name? No worries. Let’s head over to their Facebook, go to the About tab and 9/10 would’ve updated theirs with their DOB. This is a bonus, if u don’t have it still no worries. Let’s head over to the regional corporation’s website. Go to birth certificates. As for the region of Chennai, you only need to enter a minimum of 2/7 details to narrow down to their birth certificate. Now yes, here you need to spend some solid time to find the exact one. Becoz, maybe they weren’t born in Chennai or TN. So, if you know their birthplace, good, or else you’ll have to go and check all the corporation’s websites. Once u get hold of the certificate, voila!! You now have the trump card, their father’s and the mother’s name, the name of the hospital they were born in, and their permanent address at the time of birth (this might or might not be obsolete right now). Now u have 6 details about them. Now head over to the Election Commission of India’s website. Go to electoral search. Furnish all the fresh data u just mined and click search. Now you have their voter ID no., their constituency, their voting booth no., and their serial no. Now head over to the electoral rolls for their constituency. Find the booth’s roll sheet, go to the serial no. that u just found and again voila!! There it is, you have their house number. If suppose u can manage to go to the actual booth u might even manage to get their full address. But still no worries, u might be lucky. Since Google has now gotten clever, it almost has all house nos. This right here will help u to find their actual address. If this address from Google Maps comes under the electoral constituency of your person, good you are 90% there. Just to make sure, check whether their parent’s names (sibling’s names too, if u know them) are also on the same electoral sheet.

To be more sure, now u are going to use the actual personalization policy. Stalk all their statuses, stories, and social media posts. Create a travel pattern. If they are posting a picture from one particular place frequently, circle in a radius and tally whether the address that u have in hand comes inside this circle. Anywhere between 7-10 Km would be perfect, ranging from less to most frequent posts from that place. And u now officially have their address.

If suppose they haven’t digitally checked in on a location and u still can’t find out the exact location from a picture in their post, do this.

Some social media sites still preserve the time, date, and location of the picture intact. Download and decrypt them.

Analyze the picture pixel by pixel, every detail counts.

Lemme give you an example, a person that I was looking for, was standing inside a shop, and in the background, the picture had an advertisement of Virat wearing a sherwani and besides that was a stand holding a footwear. Now first analyze what all adverts have Virat signed in for, I straight away found that it was an ad for Manyavar. Now the only thing I had to do was to find all the branches of Manyavar in the region that am searching for which is next to a footwear shop. And yes, the footwear shop was a “Mochi” (a retailer) and that’s it I was able to spot the location within minutes. This is just an example.

*Pls, do not misuse this, this is meant only for academic purposes*

Here I would like to mention that if a noob like me can gather this level of important data, think about the capabilities of these AI engines with the luxury of personalization that they can afford for free. Be cautious.

The rule of thumb here is that if you don't want a complete stranger on the street corner to know the information, you don't want to share it on the Internet. If you wouldn't give your phone number to anyone who asked for it, don't share it online either.

I think a lot of it has to do with the attitude of "it won't happen to me."

By posting your birthday, where you live and work, or even your last name, you can leave a thread that hackers and scammers can follow: Consider not sharing that information on social media (your real friends will know your birthday anyway, right?) or keeping your account private. Some people even use a middle name as their last name on social media for even more security. Avoid posting your location.

As a person, I always try to keep my social media accounts outdated. Even though my goal is to keep them badly outdated, I fail at it. So that is why I try to keep them outdated on a trail of 3-month intervals or I would like to play it cleverly by posting them as stories instead of a post, that way they disappear after a while and won’t prevent me from keeping my accounts outdated. And now u know why this was not a post but rather just a story.

“For an 8-character password, it literally takes less than a second for a computing machine to go through the possibilities and pull that password out. Shift your thinking from passwords to passphrases. Something like ‘margaretthatcherisa110%SEXY’ would be a kickass password” Edward Snowden said in an interview.

In the end, it all comes down to you. The data u share, the traces u leave behind.

Some small tips from this noob would be:

Use an adblocker

Use a proper VPN

Rub the keys after u have entered the pin at a POS or an ATM (Do ppl still do this?)

Disable “My Activity” for your Google account.

Use apps like Brave/Tor, Instapro, Vanced YouTube, Protonmail, Duckduckgo, and Signal instead of Chrome, Instagram, YouTube, Gmail, Google, and WhatsApp respectively.