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Protecting Your
Internet Identity
 Protecting Your
Internet Identity
Are You Naked Online?
Updated Edition

Ted Claypoole and Theresa Payton

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield

First edition published 2012.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Claypoole, Ted, 1963– author. | Payton, Theresa, 1966– author.

Title: Protecting your internet identity : are you naked online? / Ted Claypoole and
Theresa Payton.
Description: Updated Edition. | Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Revised
edition of the authors’ Protecting your internet identity, 2012. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014745 (print) | LCCN 2016017408 (ebook) | ISBN
9781442265394 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442265400 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Online identities—Social aspects. | Online identity theft—Prevention. |
Internet—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM851 .C57 2017 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC
302.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014745

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Foreword �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������vii

Chapter ONE  How Were You Exposed? ������������������������������������������ 1

Chapter TWO Peekers and Gawkers: Who’s Looking
at Your Online Persona?������������������������������������������������������������������������ 21
Chapter THREE  Behavioral Targeting ���������������������������������������������� 59
Chapter FOUR  Self-Examination ������������������������������������������������������ 80
Chapter FIVE  Time to Get Dressed ���������������������������������������������� 106
Chapter SIX Protecting Identity in a Crisis: Identity
Theft and Defamation �������������������������������������������������������������������������� 124
Chapter SEVEN Branding Your Public Persona������������������������������ 150
Chapter EIGHT  Your Right to Be Forgotten and
to Complain Online������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 164
Chapter NINE  Dress for Career Success �������������������������������������� 174
Chapter TEN Don’t Forget the Kids���������������������������������������������� 193
Chapter ELEVEN Turning Off the Lights: Choosing
to Be Invisible Online���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 231

Notes �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 249

Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 259
About the Authors������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 277

v
 Foreword
Chris Swecker

O
n the Internet, governments, big business, private citizens, and crimi-
nals have all learned how to harvest and use personal data for many
purposes—both legal and illegal. In fact, any person or business that
cares to harvest that information and has developed a basic level of skill can do
so. This is the main thrust of Theresa Payton and Ted Claypoole’s excellent
work, Protecting Your Internet Identity. They point out that although the Internet
and Web represent some of the greatest technological innovations in the world,
they present risks and dangers few Internet users appreciate. As a result, people
fail to protect themselves from those who would exploit that information at the
expense of safety, privacy, and even financial security.
Finally, there is a guide written by cyberexperts, not for technogeeks, but
for the average Internet user. Cyberauthorities Payton and Claypoole explain
in plain language how the World Wide Web is actually the “Wild Wild Web.”
They explain why we must open our eyes to the peril we are exposed to when
we engage in routine activities such as opening a browser, accessing our e-mail,
or paying our bills online. This book is required reading for Internet users
because it simplifies critical concepts about the cyberenvironment and provides
the reader with essential knowledge and tips on how to mitigate the dangers and
become the master of your Internet persona.
The Internet is one of the last frontiers. It is barely regulated and never
policed. When you access the Internet, there are no rules, and therefore no rules
to enforce. As coauthor and Internet law expert Ted Claypoole points out, pri-
vacy laws are impotent when it comes to Internet-related privacy breeches, and
there are only a handful of practical remedies. The book effectively paints the
picture in terms we all can understand. We seldom stop to total how much sen-
sitive information about ourselves we voluntarily consign to others in exchange
for social interaction, a discount, or simply to access a product or service. This
information can be our most private thoughts expressed on Facebook, purchases
made while displaying our preferred customer card, our physical location via the

vii
FOREWORD

GPS on our mobile device, and even our financial data courtesy of our favorite
financial institution. Inevitably this information ends up on the Internet, where
it is vulnerable to being bought and sold by various businesses and marketing
firms or stolen and exploited by tech-savvy criminal organizations.
The irony is not so much that we give the information voluntarily but that
most of us have no idea how to exercise control over how that information is
acquired and used. Theresa Payton is an authority on this subject, having held an
executive-level technology security position at one of the world’s largest financial
institutions and worked on the front lines of the cyberwars as the chief informa-
tion officer (CIO) for the White House. She and Claypoole present a tutorial
on how we can control and effectively harness the information we expose for our
own purposes, such as facilitating a business marketing plan or just to protect our
privacy in a digital world. This is valuable information for people who are uneasy
about exposing their information on the Web.
Chapter 6 describes the unlimited opportunities for cybercriminals to steal
via the Internet. Theft of data is the perfect crime. It can be stolen from a
computer in Russia, Bulgaria, or Romania, but unlike a car, jewelry, or a tan-
gible object, it is not “missing.” It’s still there on your computer, and you don’t
notice something bad has happened until it’s too late. As an FBI special agent
for twenty-five years and ultimately the head of all FBI criminal investigations,
I developed an acute understanding of how the Internet evolved to become
the nesting ground and launching pad for the most sophisticated criminals
in the world. The old brick-and-mortar crime model is outdated. In this new
crime paradigm, the old adage that you can steal more money with a pen than
a gun needs updating: you can steal more money with a computer than a gun.
Cyberthieves never have to set foot in this country, making it difficult to inves-
tigate, and even more difficult to prosecute, violators.
Claypoole and Payton explain how the new black market currency is “per-
sonally identifiable information” (PII) and how these cybergangs use social
engineering techniques such as phishing, pharming, whaling, and malware of
every description to steal your user ID, password, or other sensitive information.
Chapter 6 describes how this information is sold on the cyber black market and
ultimately used to take over your bank accounts or even your identity.
Chapter 10, which deals with child predators on the Internet, is a must-read
for parents with children who surf the Web, e-mail, tweet, Facebook, text, or
routinely touch the Internet in any fashion. This chapter describes the dangers
presented by pedophiles and sex offenders who troll the Internet for lonely teens
and attempt to gain their trust. The ultimate goal of many of these deviants is to
make personal contact with these vulnerable children for the purpose of sexual
exploitation. It’s not a pretty picture, but it is entirely preventable. This chapter
alone is worth the price of the book.

viii
 FOREWORD

Nothing that touches the Internet is secure. This has been widely acknowledged
by U.S. government officials such as Gordon Snow, assistant director of the
FBI’s Cyber Crime Division, in his statement before the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee on April 12, 2011, where he testified that “a determined adversary
will likely be able to penetrate any system that is accessible directly from the
Internet.” The Internet is a high-crime neighborhood and must be respected if
you are going to expose your personal information to every other human being
on the planet.
If one were to prioritize chapters of this book in order of importance and
relevance to your online wellness, I highly recommend dwelling on chapters 8
and 11, which deal with exercising your choice to be invisible online when you
feel the need to do so. As the authors point out, our online anonymity and pri-
vacy are distinct from each other. Privacy is generally a legal standard, whereas
choosing to be anonymous requires taking steps to disguise your true identity,
which Internet users may do for valid reasons. This chapter is an invaluable aid
to those doing Web research, blogging, or who are active social networkers. Fol-
lowing the advice provided is another step to clothing yourself and your loved
ones from 800 million prying eyes. In this area knowledge is power.
This book is direct, digestible, and practical. Unfortunately, most works that
deal with cybersecurity and data privacy are readable only by techies and attor-
neys who specialize in this area of the law. Most people know how to use the
Internet and the latest electronic communication devices, but they are not inter-
ested in mastering the inner workings of the technology. Use of industry jargon
and dissecting the technology behind firewalls and viruses or parsing complex
privacy laws is like telling someone how to build a watch when they only need
to know the time. Internet users don’t need the subject further obscured or
complicated; they need the same commonsense awareness levels of the risks and
dangers that they have concerning their physical security, their houses, their
cars, and their belongings. The most effective police anticrime campaigns don’t
dissect the laws and the technology behind burglar alarms, locking devices, or
pepper spray; they arm you with sensible information and tips on how to avoid
becoming an easy victim. Bravo for the authors, Claypoole and Payton, who
have accomplished this with Protecting Your Internet Identity. This book is long
overdue and will arm you with all the tools and knowledge you need to avoid
risky, unnecessary exposure. Ignore their advice at your own peril.

ix
 Chapter 1
How Were You Exposed?

W
e are all born naked.
We emerge into this world with nothing to hide. But we are born
into a complex human society, and it soon forces us to cloak our-
selves in secrets. We choose to hide many aspects of ourselves from the world.
Finances and romances, opinions and frustrations, imperfections and bad habits
are all sensitive, personal information. The longer our lives, the more private
information we accumulate.
Today the Internet threatens to strip us bare. By broadcasting many of our
most sensitive and important secrets and keeping that information available and
searchable indefinitely, the Internet displays aspects of our lives that we thought
we’d kept private. Even worse, the Internet allows other people to collect facts
about us and to aggregate those facts into a picture of our lives. The news is
filled with stories about young people and celebrities who “tweet” their lives
away, broadcasting their most intimate thoughts, feelings, and circumstances to
anyone who will pay attention. The current world of reality television is built
on the relationships between exhibitionists who will do anything for fame and
voyeurs who find their actions fascinating. Social media sites such as Facebook
and Instagram rely on their users’ eagerness to share information—both intimate
and mundane—in real time. Current culture is a fact-sharing machine, and the
Internet is one of its most prominent engines.
This book starts with the assumption that some aspects of our lives should
not be shared with everyone in the world and that you should have control over
what you share and how you share it. We believe that privacy has value. Privacy
protects our families and our peace of mind. Privacy is a strategy for shielding
resources from thieves and our children from predators, it is a prudent business
tactic for negotiations, and it is an important social tool when meeting new
people. In this chapter, we look at how your personal information has become a
commodity and just who is exposing you online.

1
Protecting Your internet identitY

Putting the Persona in Perspective

Elia Kazan, the great American film director and cofounder of the Actors Stu-
dio, said, “I am many men, but none of them is me.” The various aspects of a
personality can add up to a whole person, but no single aspect accurately portrays
a person’s life. The Internet persona is, in many ways, a separate self. This public
self may reflect a portion of the private self, but the private self is always much
more than the online persona reveals.
The Internet persona is a shadow of celebrity. You can learn more about your
neighbors or some of your children’s teachers than the most avid tabloid readers
could have discovered about their favorite celebrities thirty years ago. When a
private citizen tweets about her breakfasts on Twitter, shows her travel photos on
Instagram or Tumblr, discusses her favorite team in public sports comments, and
explains her business on LinkedIn and her company website, you could spend
all day just following her movements. An Internet persona can be celebrated or
excoriated, but it is most often ignored until a need arises to know more. So it
rests and grows online, waiting for someone to care enough to pay attention.

The Historical Persona

Most of our parents and grandparents did not make distinctions between
their public and private personas because they were known by their neighbors,
family, and friends and no one else. Without the self-publishing tool of the
Internet, private individuals remained private to the world and left only a trail
of official notices in their wakes—birth records, wedding announcements,
land transfers, and obituaries describing as much of their lives as their children
wanted to expose. Before the Internet, a public persona was not an option or a
problem to be managed for most people. It simply did not exist.
Of course, some people in past centuries who were published authors or
entertainers led more public lives. Their lives provide an interesting example of
the management and manipulation of public faces. These writers, politicians,
and entertainers of the past help us understand how a public image differs from
a private image. In some cases, a leader’s supporters created myths to emphasize
the leader’s more admirable traits. Young George Washington never chopped
down a cherry tree or said, “I cannot tell a lie,” and a three-year-old Davy
Crockett clearly did not kill a bear. The public persona of each celebrity was
exaggerated for effect.
Sometimes writers created a different public persona to hide behind when
writing dangerously controversial material. In the eighteenth century, François-
Marie Arouet published his work under dozens of pseudonyms, including the
name Voltaire. His influential writings on politics and the rights of man were
inflammatory enough to earn him exile from his homeland. Many of the most

2
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

influential arguments for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were pub-
lished in the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius, and these were
probably written by American founding fathers Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, and John Jay. These authors chose to develop public images that dif-
fered from their private lives.

The Internet Persona

In the age of the Internet, a public persona is forced on us, growing with
or without our conscious contribution. Thanks to the Internet, we are all enter-
tainers and publishers now. We can all send thoughts, opinions, and videos of
ourselves throughout the world with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger.
Hundreds of millions of people have Facebook pages, LiveJournal diaries, Flickr
picture archives, or postings on other social media sites. Millions of people com-
ment on public message boards for the New York Times online, CNET, the Fox
News website, and ESPN.com. Thousands of new blogs are published every day.
Now that everyone is able to entertain or publish online, the Internet persona is
a fact of life for all of us, and it is a permanent, written record of our lives out
there for everyone to see.

The Growth of Your Online Personas

Information about each of us collects on the Internet. This happens whether
we approve of the information and whether we intentionally contribute it. As
you’ll see later in this chapter, you and others are building your online persona
through a variety of activities. The things you write about yourself and your life,
the pictures you or others upload, define you for many Internet users.
Even people who never go online have information about them posted on
the Internet. Significant information about your life is available from public
databases. Organizations that you join may provide facts about you on the Inter-
net. Friends may expose information and never think to ask you if that’s okay.
Coworkers may post information about you on their social media pages.
This set of information may not be an accurate description of you, but
because it’s easy to find on search engines, this is what many people consider
to be the truth about you. You can ignore your online persona and let it grow
unchecked, or you can measure it and manage it, just as famous entertainers or
authors manage their stage or literary personas.

One Example: Online Scandal

Consider a scandal in Washington, D.C., played out online but with con-
sequences in the real world.
Jessica Cutler, twenty-six years old, worked as an aide to Ohio senator Mike
DeWine. After work, Cutler led an active social life, but when she decided to

3
Protecting Your internet identitY

document her social liaisons in the nation’s capital, her life took a wrong turn
that ended badly for her.1
Cutler created an Internet diary, called a blog. Her blog was anonymous and
published online under the title of Washingtonienne. The Washingtonienne blog
created a scandal as readers tried to guess the identities of the writer and her
paramours. She described frequent sexual liaisons with men in her life, writing
at one point that she was currently having sex “with six guys. Ewww.”
It’s easy to see why the Washingtonienne blog became required reading for so
many people working in D.C. Nearly every day brought news of another sexual
rendezvous, including the Washington hangouts where meetings occurred, inti-
mate descriptions of what happened, and the writer’s evaluation of her feelings
about the men involved and about her own behavior. She discussed her lovers’
high-powered political jobs, but she protected their identities with a mysterious
letter code. No one knew who the Washingtonienne was or who she was meeting.
Her blog made it seem that she could be sitting next to you at a Georgetown bar
or an Arlington restaurant on any given night, then going home or to a hotel
for outrageous carnal activity, only to jump online the next morning and tell
everyone about it.
She claimed to be trading sex for money with powerful men, writing, “Most
of my living expenses are thankfully subsidized by a few generous older gentle-
men. I’m sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way:
how can anybody live on $25K/year??”
Anonymous Internet writers had created hoaxes before and the
Washingtonienne’s stories seemed too lurid to be true, yet the details seemed
too specific to be a deception. People talked about her in their offices. Who
was the Washingtonienne, and did she really work on Capitol Hill? How was
she juggling this many relationships? Was it true that a presidentially appointed
chief of staff was paying her for sex?
Her life, which seemed so out of control to readers of her blog, finally
crashed. The Washingtonienne was fired from her job on Senator DeWine’s
staff for misuse of government computers. This was the last post before
Washingtonienne’s firing: “I just took a long lunch with X and made a quick
$400. When I returned to the office, I heard that my boss was asking about my
whereabouts. Loser.”
Another female Washington, D.C., government blogger, Ana Marie Cox
of the popular policy blog Wonkette, named Jessica Cutler as the author of
the Washingtonienne blog. Ms. Cox ran an interview with Ms. Cutler on the
Wonkette blog, and the Washington Post soon followed suit with a full-feature
story including pictures of the mysterious Washingtonienne.
Ms. Cutler’s secret identity as the Washingtonienne affected her life in many
ways, apart from the lost job in the U.S. Senate offices. Predictably, Ms. Cutler

4
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

posed naked for Playboy and was offered a book deal worth a reported $300,000
advance. Her book inspired a Washingtonienne-based television series produced
by HBO. She was also sued by one of her coworkers, who alleged that he was
discussed in the Washingtonienne blog as one of her many lovers. Ms. Cutler
ended up filing for bankruptcy.2
Cutler was literally and figuratively naked online. She developed an online
persona, and it took over her life. She believed she could hide behind an anony-
mous Internet pen name, but in the end, her online persona merged with her
real life of work, family, and friends. She was not the first to develop a separate
online persona or the first to make money from doing so. Bloggers with online
pseudonyms like Perez Hilton, the Daily Kos, and Lonelygirl15 boast millions
of readers.
Although writing salacious autobiography has long been a path to celeb-
rity, today’s Internet provides fame and infamy to people who are clever
or even unlucky with a smartphone camera. For example, more than forty
million viewers subscribe to a YouTube channel where they watch a young
Swedish man play video games and comment on the action. The man calls
himself PewDiePie, and he made more than $7 million in 2014 from his
YouTube following.3 Another video channel called Vine only allows clips of
six seconds or shorter and has spawned movie deals and significant incomes
to the people who produce and star in these tiny films. A company may pay
up to $50,000 for a Vine star to use its product in the six-second video.4 Paul
Vasquez, a California firefighter and trucker, became an overnight Internet
sensation when he was caught on video effusing over a double rainbow. He
later turned his Internet fame into a sponsorship deal with Microsoft. He
is known to the millions of people who have seen his video as “the double-
rainbow guy.”

The Moral?
We are all complicated people with many aspects to our lives, and we
change our identities as we grow in life. Today’s wild child is tomorrow’s
suburban housewife. Today’s poor college student may be running a huge
corporation tomorrow. Seeing one aspect of someone’s life through the
prism of Internet writing may provide insight into that person, but it dis-
plays a skewed and inaccurate overall portrait. Cutler may have matured into
a sedate wife and mother, but many people will know her primarily for the
wildness of her young, single years and the scandal it caused. Vasquez will
eternally be tied to one excitable moment caught on video. An Internet per-
sona can be dangerous for many reasons, but it can be particularly dangerous
as a brief snapshot from which people draw broader conclusions for years to
come.

5
Protecting Your internet identitY

how Information Is treated Online

In results that surprised even the researchers, a study conducted by social scien-
tists at the University of California–Berkeley and the University of Pennsylva-
nia found that American adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four
claim to care as much about online privacy as older adults.5 The study also
found that young people tended to not understand the laws concerning privacy
protection and to overestimate how much legal privacy protection individuals
receive online. The researchers determined that “young-adult Americans have
an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online real-
ity that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.” And they’re
not alone.
Social media rewards its users for publishing more and more information
all the time. Comments, picture postings, likes, and the use of popular hashtags
build a person’s popularity and raise the profile of the poster. Find and post the
most and best beach photographs or architectural drawings on Instagram and
you are more likely to find other people interested in the same things you are.
Tweet the most about a political position and garner the attention of the top
people promoting the same position. On social media, more information means
more interaction and more chances at a meaningful connection to other people.

What Information Can Be Discovered Online?

Imagine that new neighbors are coming to live next door. You haven’t seen
them yet but know that they closed on the house and are moving in next month.
What could you discover about them using the Internet, even if you don’t know
their names?
You know their new address, so you can find their names online in the
county records describing the real estate transfer of their new house, and you can
probably find out their current address. You can also discover how much the new
neighbors paid for the house and what lender they used, if they have a mortgage.
If both names of a married couple are included in the housing records, you
can search the wedding announcements in the archives of their hometown news-
paper to get more information about them. For example, the New York Times
provides a searchable archive of wedding announcements published since 1981,
including full text and analysis of hundreds of thousands of nuptials.
So what could you learn from these sources? You can find out their full
family names, their ages, their parents’ names and occupations, where the
couple attended school, and some financial information. A quick search for birth
announcements related to the same couple may yield the names and ages of their
children. Many towns also keep dog license registration records online, so you
may be able to find out what breed they own and even the dog’s name.

6
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

You can do all of this research on public Internet sites without ever running
a general search for either neighbor’s name using a search engine such as Google,
Yahoo!, or Bing. But if you need more information to perform ID theft or stalk
a family member, you’ll find that general searches can unearth employment
information, family and genealogy data, social media postings made by family
members themselves, and much, much more.

Exposure Is Rewarded
Everyone participating on the Internet exists in a world geared toward
encouraging exposure of personal data. Social media sites are built to reward
the sharing of information. The more people know about you on Facebook,
the more points of connection they find and the more “friends” you will attract.

Information Rules
Think about the basic information most Facebook users reveal, then
measure how many classmates, former coworkers, fellow Labradoodle lovers,
cybercreeps, and long-lost family members are attracted by these revelations.
Facebook’s marketing pitch generally includes the concept that “you get more
out of it if you put more into it.” Your active participation in these sites is a cycle
of personal disclosure and social or financial rewards for your level of sharing.
People use social media as a confessional, a watercooler, and even a psycho-
analyst’s couch. They tell secrets, they cry out in anguish, and they beg for other
people to react. In many Internet communities, the deepest secrets and rawest
emotions are rewarded with the warmest words of acceptance. Author Dave
Eggers, exploring how people use social media as a tool for human connection,
wrote in his book The Circle, “Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence,
in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer
pain. It was communion.”6
In addition, commercial websites, from newspapers to banks and stores
selling goods and services online, can profit from knowledge of their customers
and visitors. Those sites encourage visitor participation and often place software
called cookies onto visitors’ computers. Cookies allow the sites to recognize your
computer when you visit, track your shopping activity, make suggestions of
items you might like, and even greet you by name.
Cookies and other tracking technologies also allow owners of commercial
sites to better understand the habits of their Internet visitors and often to sell
that information to advertisers. Those advertisers can then create more targeted
advertising.
For example, have you ever noticed that the same banner advertisements
seem to follow your browser as you click through various Internet pages? Why
does your spouse always see ads about sports cars, whereas you see ads about

7
Protecting Your internet identitY

cooking? Some sites make assumptions about you and use these assumptions
to place you in an advertising program based on your online activities and cal-
culated to interest you. You would be surprised (and not a little frightened) at
the information they collect about you from a variety of sources to make these
assumptions.
Although capturing your data for online advertising has always been surrep-
titious and hard to spot, a new trend sneaks its signals right past your ears. As
both Internet browsing and online marketing become more sophisticated, the
tracking tools change. Following the rise of smartphones and tablets to access
the Internet, advertisers were faced with a new challenge to know their prospec-
tive customers: how can a marketer know that the “John Lee” who accessed the
Levi’s website from his laptop computer is the same “John Lee” who accessed the
Levi’s website from his smartphone, or his tablet, or his television, or his car, or
his desktop computer at work? Stitching together the knowledge of who is oper-
ating each of these devices is an exercise called cross-platform marketing, or, more
specifically, cross-device tracking and attempts to learn about all of a user’s access
devices have grabbed the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Marketers such as SilverPush have been experimenting with strange technology
to track their customers across various Internet access devices.
Some advertisers are using subsonic signals—sounds that are too low or too
high for people to hear—to force Internet access devices to communicate with
each other. If you visit a SilverPush-enabled site on your laptop computer, the
computer’s speaker may send out one of these “silent” signals, and the micro-
phone on your smartphone may recognize the signal and the smartphone may
both store it, and find a way to signal back. SilverPush technology can also
insert subsonic audio into television commercials that can be “heard” by your
smartphone or computer without you even knowing the connection exists. This
method uses device proximity in the real world to discover more information
about you, rather than relying on your Internet activities.

What Amazon Knows about You

But online collection of your information is amazing too. Amazon is a major
online retailer, selling everything from clothing to cookware to electronics. This
company uses its knowledge of the books, music, and other products that you
have searched for or bought, including how long you spent exploring any single
topic or item, to suggest additional products that you might be interested in.
If you read descriptions of or buy several books on French cooking, for
example, you may be shown other popular books on the topic for your consider-
ation. If you buy a vintage Frank Sinatra album or the newest hit from Kendrick
Lamar, Amazon will propose other music from the same artist or genre that
customers have purchased recently. This site even encourages you to suggest

8
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

music playlists or literary reading lists to guide shoppers who may share your
preferences, but what they’re really doing is collecting information about your
interests.
Once again, on this Internet commerce site, just like social media sites, your
information is solicited and providing more data is rewarded by the site. Not
only does the site track your movements and purchases, but it also solicits your
comments and opinions on a broad range of topics, from books you have read
to the service provided by Amazon. You are encouraged to return to the site and
offer reviews of any books, music, or other products that you purchased there.
Your reviews are supposed to provide other shoppers with the benefit of your
analysis, but at the same time, they give Amazon more information about you.
Amazon allows other product users to rank the helpfulness of your review,
providing yet another reason for you to return and check how the community
responded to your wisdom. Each of these acts of sharing is supposed to enrich
your shopping experience at Amazon, to make the site’s anticipation of your
wishes more accurate, and to make you feel more like a member of a community.
For Amazon, enriching your online experience in these ways is a psycho-
logical technique to keep you in the website longer and draw you back to the
online store more often. It is the Internet equivalent of providing a coffee bar
and comfortable furniture in a brick-and-mortar bookstore to make you feel
more at home and to encourage you to browse, read, and buy. However, in the
online version of this strategy, you provide Amazon, and maybe other Amazon
customers and partners, with a wealth of information about you and about your
preferences. Amazon takes the information gathering a step further by offer-
ing its Amazon Prime service. For a relatively small annual payment, Amazon
Prime opens a wide selection of benefits to the Prime customer, from free ship-
ping for items purchased on the main Amazon website to a lending library for
people who own Amazon’s Kindle tablets. Prime ties an Internet user closer to
Amazon, because once shipping fees are waived then shopping for nearly any-
thing Amazon offers, from music to gardening tools, becomes easier and as cost
effective as running to a local store. Membership in Prime also provides Amazon
with more information about your tastes and priorities.
Amazon is not by any means alone in these practices, and, in unscrupulous
hands, these same practices can be used for much more than selling you a book
or DVD.

Why Now?
Why worry now about my online persona? The Internet has been with us for
a long time—why have we not been reading about issues of privacy in the early
years? Although the Internet has been available to the general public for more
than twenty-five years now, the way that it works and the sharing of personal

9
Protecting Your internet identitY

information have changed drastically over time. At first, the Internet was used
for computer file transfers, electronic mail, and text-based chat groups. As
browser software became popular and millions of people joined content-heavy
services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online, they learned to find
interesting information about government, businesses, or simply other people.
E-commerce began to flourish online in the 1990s, and within a decade,
nearly every commercial and consumer business felt the need to supplement
its sales with some kind of online store. The cost of computer storage dropped
drastically in the early 2000s. In addition, the development of technologies such
as video streaming and video sharing allowed websites to use more sophisticated
graphics, video, and audio files.
The era of Web 2.0, with increased interactivity between Internet users and
websites, brought with it the possibility that every user of the Internet could
not only receive information but also share their information and interact with
others. Applications accessed from devices such as tablets and smartphones have
moved Internet usage to a mobile platform. And where the Internet was once
reached primarily through devices created for the task, online access is rapidly
evolving into an activity that can be enjoyed everywhere from every device—
from automobiles to airplanes to television sets—connectivity is spreading to
a vast array of machines. These machines also collect and manage information
about their users.
All of these changes have created a separate realm, accessed by anyone
with the right cell phone or computer, where people learn and share informa-
tion about each other. It has only been within the last decade, with the rise of
social networks and the avalanche of personal information migrating online, that
most of us have developed a substantial online persona. And the issue is likely
to continue growing in importance as the Internet expands its reach into our
personal lives.
Now is the time to recognize that you have an online reputation and to take
control of it before years of information accumulates.

Who’s Looking at You Online?

Before you think about exactly how you might be exposing yourself online, con-
sider who’s looking at your information. Your friends are not the only people
examining your Facebook page. A study conducted for Careerbuilder.com found
that 45 percent of companies search social networks to screen employment can-
didates.7 Your spouse’s divorce lawyer is looking, too. A survey conducted by the
American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers showed that 66 percent of divorce
lawyers claimed that Facebook was their primary source of evidence.8 And your
Facebook postings may affect your service on jury duty. For example, the district

10
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

attorney’s office of Cameron County, Texas, based in Brownsville, incorporates

social media as part of its jury screening process.
Once information is out there and publicly accessible, it can be viewed by
any individual or organization, and it will be used to draw conclusions about you

Featured Website: The Internet

Archive

When people tell you that information on the Internet lasts forever, they’re
right, largely because of the existence of the Internet Archive. The Internet
Archive is a nonprofit organization, classified as a library in the state of
California. The library supports an online film archive, one of the world’s
largest book digitization projects, technology for an online lending library,
and a distributable digital media collection, including otherwise unavailable
audio and video files. But the Internet Archive is perhaps best known for its
capture and collection of historical records of website content.
Also known as the “Wayback Machine,” the Internet Archive’s website
archiving service keeps searchable, linkable copies of Internet sites as those
sites existed in the past. If you want to know the board members of your
local symphony orchestra in 2004, search the orchestra’s website in the Way-
back Machine. Or search the archive if you want to check a friend’s online
biography posted by the company she worked for two years ago or read her
review of shoes she bought on a retail site.
Hundreds of millions of sites are available for historical research and
reference. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has sent software crawling
around the World Wide Web and snapping archive copies of various Inter-
net sites from governments, businesses, and private citizens. The Wayback
Machine only collects publicly available websites, not sites that require a
password. Not every site is archived, and a site owner can ask to be excluded
from the archive.
As of the publication of this book, you can find the Wayback Machine
at www.archive.org. According to the Internet Archive site, the Wayback
Machine currently includes twenty-three petabytes of data and is growing
at a rate of twenty terabytes per month. (A petabyte is a unit of information
equal to one quadrillion bytes of data, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.) The
Internet Archive also includes a mirrored copy site in Alexandria, Egypt.
Because of technical complexities, it can take six months to two years for
recently collected websites to appear in search results on the Wayback
Machine.

11
Protecting Your internet identitY

as a romantic partner, potential spouse, employee, church member, potential

victim of a crime, or parent. (See chapter 2 for more about this topic.)

Who Is exposing You?

With the right tools, the Internet allows each one of us to customize our own
Internet presence. Every Internet user can be his or her own broadcaster,
sending opinions and preferences out to the world. People create blogs and
diaries online, spilling their deepest thoughts into the cosmos. Social networks
provide a space for people to display information about themselves but also to
display their networks of friends and preferences for everything from food to
relationships.
Today you may be broadcasting your own information online, but you’re not
the only one contributing to your online persona. Organizations, governments,
friends, family, and media are also out there exposing you every day. In this sec-
tion we look at the various sources exposing you online.

You Did It Yourself

The Internet’s function of self-publication has revolutionized the way that
humans communicate with each other. If you don’t believe that, spend a day
with a teenager and see how she uses social media, text messaging, instant mes-
saging, and Skype video communication to stay in touch with friends both near
and far.
But like all revolutions, the Internet communication revolution includes
a negative side. Anyone who participates fully in social media, blogs, and the
opportunity to comment on favorite websites is revealing much to the world.
The person exposing most of your personal information online is probably you.
The Internet sites and tools discussed in this chapter are not the only ways
to display yourself on the Internet. The Web contains millions of places you
can publish information about yourself using a variety of technologies, with
more appearing every day. Not surprisingly, there are very few tools to teach you
self-censorship.
By posting a picture on the Internet and identifying yourself, you have
just provided information about your age, gender, race, your health, your social
class, your self-esteem, and your tastes. You may have included an image of your
home, a favorite vacation spot, your car, or family members or friends, revealing
even more about your life. Videos that you post may only multiply the exposure.

One Example: Facebook

If you are naked online by exposing personal information to the world, then
there is a strong probability that you have flashed the world with your Facebook

12
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

page. As of this writing, Facebook is claiming more than one and a half billion
current active users. A current active user is a person with a Facebook page who
has visited the site within the past month. Given those numbers, there are more
than twice as many Facebook users than the total populations of the United
States, Mexico, and Canada combined.
What is this staggering number of people doing at a single Internet site?
They are posting information about themselves and reading and responding to
information posted by other people. Facebook continues to add new tools to
help you provide more information about yourself to anyone interested in learn-
ing about you.
The growth of photo and video posting is also astronomical. Facebook
claims that its current daily photograph uploads average 360 million.9
Facebook includes a place to write messages viewable by everyone, includ-
ing messages to small groups and messages that can be seen by just one person.
Hundreds of millions of conversations on Facebook happen out in the open for
everyone to read.
Facebook can also help people locate you at any time. The service offers a
tool for you to tell the system exactly where you are standing at that moment—at
the grocery store, on vacation in Bali, attending the soccer game, or at home in
your kitchen—so that all of your Facebook friends, or all 1.5 billion and growing
Facebook users, depending on your privacy settings, can discover your physical
location. Criminals can even use the collected location data to understand your
daily routine—for example, when you leave your house for work or when you
buy groceries each week. This ability to locate anyone may seem offensive or
intriguing to you, but when you think of someone knowing your child’s every
move, it’s a use of technology that becomes frightening.
The bottom line: If you choose to accept all of the offered Facebook invita-
tions to share information, many of the important facts, routines, people, and
passions in your life will be available to millions of people.

Expressing Yourself in Comments

Spotlighting your own life on social networks is not the only way that you
expose yourself online. Many commercial Internet sites have comment features
that allow visitors to post opinions and responses. You could be singing the
praises of the most comfortable pair of shoes you have ever owned or looking for
sympathy on a relationship site because you just broke up with your boyfriend.
Your postings may include Amazon book or music reviews, or they may
be political statements on the Fox News website or on Huffington Post. Your
responses may be on the website of your favorite sports team or the ESPN page
discussing your team’s greatest rival. You may say positive or negative things
about a public company on message boards tied to the performance of that

13
Protecting Your internet identitY

company’s stock price, or you may be commenting on a friend’s loud Hawaiian

shirt in weekend party pictures.
Whatever you say and wherever you post your comments, you expose your
opinions, ideas, and thought processes to billions of people. Many of these posts
are made under pseudonyms or “handles” that are not easy to trace back to you.
However, it is possible to decipher who owns a handle, and keep in mind that
anyone who learns your handle for posting on a specific website can learn a great
deal about how you think and information about your life. (We discuss later in
this book how uncovering a handle on social websites may be much easier than
you think.)
Finally, the mother of all online comments is the blog. Publishing your
own blog is similar to writing an updated page on a social media site, except
the blog tends to focus on an area of interest and provides detailed analysis of
your thinking on the subject. Many blogs are updated every day, and most well-
known blogs include at least two new entries a week. A constant stream of words
on nearly any subject can tell the world about your thinking process and prob-
ably leave clues about your work or home life. A blog often is little more than
a lengthy online comment that includes thousands of words of self-revelation.
At the beginning of this chapter we discussed the blog of the Washingtoni-
enne. Her blog is not an isolated phenomenon. According to Wordpress’s web-
site, in 2016 more than 409 million people viewed more than 21.5 billion blog
pages each month, and Wordpress bloggers produce about 55.8 million new
posts each month. These are just a small fraction of online content that can be
classified as blogging. These Internet publications could be the random mus-
ings of madmen, detailed discussion of politics or technological products, or the
growing phenomenon of mommy blogging—providing tips, product reviews,
and shopping deals for raising kids in a specific location.
Twitter is a tool for microblogging, blogs that have a limited number of
characters of text per posting. The Twitter technology allows pictures and small
text messages to be posted online and sent directly to anyone who “follows you”
on Twitter. Whereas some people use Twitter to post details on their daily com-
mute and every mundane thought that enters their brains, others use the tech-
nology to organize political rallies, to call attention to the everyday movements
of celebrities, or to lead teams on scavenger hunts. Twitter may be intrusive and
pervasive, revealing everything about the writer from his or her deepest thoughts
to up-to-the-minute location data.
Finally, you could be exposing your personal habits to others based only on
the type of websites you frequent. The Internet offers interest-specific sites for
stamp collectors, rugby players, and people who suffer from rare skin diseases.
The fact that you have chosen to spend your time or become a member of any of
these sites can speak volumes about you. In 2015, the Ashley Madison website

14
 HOW WERE YOU EXPOSED?

Are You Exposing Yourself?

Add the numbers of your answers to find your score.

The information you post online is

1. next to nothing.
2. only the most basic information.
3. professional and business data only.
4. professional and personal.
5. everything I think or do, in real time.

Do you publish a blog or online diary?

1. No
2. Yes, but it can only be accessed by a small group of friends with whom I
am close.
3. Yes, but it can only be accessed by my “friends,” many of whom I have not
met in person.
4. Yes, it is a public blog, but I never write about my personal life.
5. Yes, I write about myself for everyone to see.

How often do you post on Facebook?

1. Never, I don’t have a Facebook page.
2. Less than once a month
3. At least once a week
4. Every day
5. Many times a day

Your personal Web presence is best described as

1. a few words of text.
2. anonymous reviews and comments.
3. a short, personal biography.
4. biography, pictures, and video.
5. all of the above, plus postings.
6. I post naked pictures of myself online.

Scoring
4–7 Careful and protective
8–11 Just testing the waters
12–16 Unabashed Internet junkie
17–21 Baring everything

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