De-Monetize Me: How To Keep Your Data To Yourself

Personal information is the currency on which much of the internet depends.

- Max Eddy

It’s gathered everywhere, often without people’s knowledge, and it effectively pays the bills on many free services and apps we take for granted. Depending on how radical you are, you could see this as a fair trade in exchange for services—or as companies extracting free labor from the internet-using populace.

THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

Understanding this ecosystem is difficult, but removing yourself from it is even harder. For starters, years’ worth of your information is already in the possession of numerous legal data-broker sites.

In the course of writing “How Companies Turn You Into Money,” I looked at and purchased information from several data brokers. I then took stock of the sheer bulk of information I had knowingly and unknowingly provided to social media services. It’s staggering.

That’s not even considering the volume of my personal data that is invisible to the outside world—locked up inside the databases of publishers, third-party advertising companies, search sites such as Google, and so on. That data is compiled, sliced, diced, perhaps anonymized, and distributed entirely outside my control.

Then there’s the information that has been stolen. Some of this I know about. My Social Security number (among other things) was stolen during the now-legendary Office of Personnel Management hack, where data stored by a major government office was exfiltrated. It’s a running joke of mine that privacy doesn’t really matter much to me, since the Chinese government can probably check my credit.

But hopelessness is boring. If technology got me into this mess, I can try to use technology to get me back out.

CLEANING UP THE MESS