The Importance of Family
Privacy is difficult. It requires a heavy initial lift to implement defensive and offensive privacy measures followed by sustained efforts to preserve them. One of the biggest hurdles I’ve had to help clients overcome in the pursuit of privacy is the involvement of family. Similarly, I’ve turned down engagements when it became clear that the client’s family was not on board. There is no sense in making a huge lifestyle change, taking on the added stress, and committing to the substantial resource investment if those closest to you are only set to erode any progress you may make. Don’t try and swim against the current.
The goal of privacy consulting is to provide the client and their family training to become privacy defenders (i.e., limiting the types of information posted on social media), so that the client is not burdened with the development or maintenance of the privacy solution.
Social media is the elephant in the room. Many consider participation or involvement in social media as a fundamental necessity, not an optional guilty pleasure. As Alec Harris and I wrote in a previous article, Smart Social Media Use, the content you, or your family, post online can have real consequences. In my experience, the patriarch or matriarch of the family is usually willing to divorce themselves from social media entirely, but asking teenage or 20-something children to step away is another matter. Not being able to get the gratification of getting a “like,” or the ability to provide an unsolicited opinion on anything, with their Facebook or Instagram accounts is a bridge too far.
In some instances, education is the best tool. We have in-person family briefings of threat assessments we conduct. This personalized due diligence goes over each family member’s digital footprint, and many are surprised to realize that the threat isn’t always in the singular post, but in the aggregate. It can be sobering to discover that a stranger, in only a matter of days, using nothing but publicly available information, is able to compile a chronology of the worst moments of your life, detailing where you’ve been, with whom, and what you did or said. At times, they can even tell you where you’re going to be. That embarrassing photo you posted on your MySpace page (yes, people still use that) is still out there, because you forgot about it and never deleted your account. The fact you use the same username on every site? Now you’re easy to connect across all those forums you joined and dating apps you signed up for.
This doesn’t stop with social media however. The pursuit of privacy requires understanding how the data is collected, and how it is used. Think about how often you use your phone number for something — whether it be registering for a new website account, connecting to a new app, or making a reservation at a restaurant. All of that data is collected, at times poorly protected by security, and either involved in a data breach or readily available to those who know where to look. Imagine needing separate phone numbers for everything you do — a personal number for your immediate family, a separate one for your friends, another for ordering a pizza or an Uber, another for setting up your utilities. This is what we recommend to our clients — a hassle yes, but it can be managed all through an app on a singular device. Consider though the problems that arise when a spouse or child mistakenly (or because of laziness or apathy) provides your “inner circle” phone number to the food delivery driver. That number goes into a system somewhere, data brokers purchase the content, and now all that work for privacy is threatened.
The vulnerability of a public home address should not be underestimated. Clients have approached me wanting to scrub where they live from the Internet. While doable, think about what this may mean to a spouse that loves to host parties or send Christmas cards. If we go through the trouble to protect your residence beneath a series of trusts and establish a mail forwarding service this can be washed away if your spouse thinks having a P.O. Box on outgoing mail is too impersonal and writes your true address instead. Or if you children want to know why it’s not a good idea to host a graduation party at your home, and don’t understand that their name and phone number are going to get updated into a phone’s contact list or posted to a Facebook Event, eroding the privacy you spent time putting together.
The data broker industry is a multi-billion dollar a year behemoth, and their algorithms are extremely sophisticated, able to compile information from the unlikeliest of places. Privacy should not be done alone — involve your family every step of the way. Besides, they may surprise you, and be just as committed as you are.
