Ask Slashdot: Can Creating New Online Accounts Reduce Privacy Risks?

rjnagle writes "I'm concerned about the implications of storing personal data on Gmail, Facebook, and other social media sites. I'm less worried about individual data than the accumulating mass of data which potentially be used against me (for targeted marketing, credit reporting and who knows what else?) One solution I'm considering is just to abandon individual accounts and start clean and new gmail/facebook accounts. So while Google/Doubleclick might possess lots of data about me from 2001-2012, from this point on, they only have a clean slate. Would this kind of solution address my privacy concerns? (assuming I remove cookies, change IP address before doing so etc). Or are an individual's profile by now so unique that simply creating a new gmail or Facebook account would fail to prevent these data collection agencies from figuring out who I am? Insights and tips are appreciated."

Comments

That's cute, kid.

[Overzeetop]

If the data mining companies already fill in your profile and preferences by scouring multiple resources and linking multiple accounts to get the best picture they can, why would you think that starting a new account would be anything other than a temporary break in their data which they would fill in as soon as they correlate the new account with your old ones?

Re:That's cute, kid.

[gl4ss]

the data is shit anyways. that's why facebook is a big deal, since they're the only one's who have enough somewhat reliable data to actually sell adverts targeted at 20-35 year old people living in country X.

if you want some crap data for them, visit sites you wouldn't normally. that doesn't stop them from selling targeted ads though, they'll just be poorly targeted.. not that they care too much.

oh and changing your gmail address wont help one bit, clearing your cookies does a lot more(if you're worried about doubleclick etc..). or heck, just use the apk hosts file method. doubleclick doesn't have your email but they have your browsing history.

Re:That's cute, kid.

[dgatwood]

And yet, their data is mostly worthless. By the time I post about something on Facebook, 99% of the time, it is no longer actionable. For example, I'm seeing ads for hot water heaters because mine sprung a leak. That's not the sort of thing you put off fixing, so by the time I saw the first water heater ad on Facebook, the new water heater was already ordered and installed.

And they keep doing that over and over. I'll order something, and the next day they'll show me ads for similar products. Helpful hint: I just bought a cornet. I'm not likely to be interested in buying a second one. At least "You just bought [X], so you might like [accessories for X]" ads would be useful, but the "You just bought [X] so you might be interested in [slight variant of X]" ads are pretty much useless. Thus far, I've seen exactly one such ad that was even marginally plausible—an ad for camera lenses from some vintage products website after I bought a vintage lens on eBay. However, even that is not the sort of thing you buy every day. Show me that ad again in a year or two.

What makes the ads even more useless is that they're for the same type of product from companies that I already do business with. They aren't introducing me to new businesses. They aren't introducing me to new products that I'm not already aware of, having just studied that business's offerings in that area. So what exactly is the purpose of showing me this ad?

But the best part is that they keep showing me ads for products made by my employer's biggest competitor. They know who my employer is.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure their data mining strategy involves a drunken monkey flinging crap against the wall.

Re:That's cute, kid.

[UnknowingFool]

So my company wanted me to either create a FB account or link to my existing FB account for some social media activity. I created a new FB account with just my name and the barest of details. Within a week, FB was suggesting friends from old account.

Re:That's cute, kid.

[Anonymous Coward]

I designed and developed such a system. The relationships are typically scored by some weight, or at least some form of network distance. If you break the connections enough, it will ultimately distance the overall relationship beyond the level that they are willing to target. We go after low hanging fruit first, and throw out nearly all of the data we even manage to get, through great difficulty, just because it is commercially useless beyond a few months.

Remember, we targeting groups, not individuals. Groups mean scale. Individuals mean work and difficulty. The low hanging fruit is what bumps up the margin. The commercial use of meta data is very different from government use of meta data. Commercial use is about groups, and an industry where people view PII as a potential liability. Government use is about PII itself, buddy favors, and corruption.

For example, the governments already know who associates with terrorists, and have been able to figure that out for decades with people on the ground, hovering around terrorists. The information they are gathering now is all about individual data. It can serve no other purpose. That is what is scary! I am not paranoid about my information being in these commercial systems, because I have seen how difficult it is to even do anything with it other than to sell some product a little bit better. Even blackmailing would be extremely difficult with commercial data. Even if I decided to try to target a single person, I would have a hell of a time doing it. The systems are not designed for that. However, the government access with no accountability, and no legitimate purpose, with data organized to target individuals, and systems developed for correlating massive amounts of historical information... commercially useless old data... old data that has no reason to be there except to harass and intimidate. That is scary.

My advice is to keep accounts fresh, delete cookies regularly, and change your IP. And, importantly, do the changes all at once so that there is no overlap that can be used to glue the new with the old. That alone will make you meaningless to any commercial system I am aware of. Government systems? I am not an expert there.

Re:That's cute, kid.

[dgatwood]

And by that, of course, you mean "Reporting pirated software saves IT jobs" ads from the BSA.

Note that it's against the rules

[ZorinLynx]

Notice that a lot of these services, particularly Facebook and Google+, specifically say it's against the rules to have more than one account.

It shows precisely their intent: To gather as much information about you and your habits as possible. They can't do it as effectively if people have multiple accounts.

This, along with not allowing pseudonyms is one of the worst things that has happened to the Internet in the past decade or so. It used to be you could have as many different accounts on different sites as you wanted. Now everything is being condensed into a small handful of services, all of which have gestapo-like policies requiring your real information and name. It's just sad.

Re:Note that it's against the rules

[c0d3g33k]

What part of "abandon the old accounts" and start new ones did you miss? The day when you are prohibited from closing/disabling/abandoning an online account will be a sadder day than the one you're lamenting about.

Re:Note that it's against the rules

[schneidafunk]

I tried signing up for a new youtube account today and was REQUIRED to give them my phone number in order for them to send me a text message to 'verify my account'. I was unable to upload a video without doing so. I ended up signing up to vimeo instead.

Re:Note that it's against the rules

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What they really don't want(though people screwing up on cookies and IPs and such reduces the risk a bit) is effective segregation of different parts of your life at the same time.

If somebody merely tries to 'start clean' every year/2years/5years/whatever, either he also gives up all his friends/family/contacts, or he might as well not bother, his new account will slot neatly back into his old networks and habits, and it just won't do much.

If somebody has a strictly segregated set of accounts for different purposes, it makes each individual account less valuable(because the 'being a social dickhead' account now has no attached consumer preferences or professional income data) and it isn't necessarily the case that the accounts tie back together, barring mistakes on the user's part.

Of course, with many of them enforcing 'real name' policies, and using facial recognition such that anybody posting a picture of you can rat you out, it isn't clear that you can win.

Re:Note that it's against the rules

[Anonymous Coward]

So stop lapping up the free shit that they're grunting out in your face.

Demand paid services that will guarantee you some privacy, and pay for it. Stop expecting Google to run Gmail for free.

Time was, you'd make a product, and charge a reasonable fee for it, and have a happy customer.

Now, you make a product, give it away, and make money by doing things that harm your customers - like selling their personal data for a quick buck.

Thanks Google.

Re:Note that it's against the rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried signing up for a new youtube account today and was REQUIRED to give them my phone number in order for them to send me a text message to 'verify my account'. I was unable to upload a video without doing so. I ended up signing up to vimeo instead.

You only have to provide a phone number if you check the box to skip the captcha.

I have enough accounts....

[ackthpt]

I need people to just let me get things done as Guest.

There are many trace points

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you replace your NIC adapter or manually change the MAC address.
- sites can identify you by your network interface
Did you burn all your web history in your browser?
- sites leave cookies and other stuff
Did you change your browser or hack it's ID string?
- the browser ID and OS combination are pretty good identifiers at infrequently visited sites or with cross correlation.
Did you ever attach your old ID to address or credit card information?
- they will attach the new online account to the history if they can make a match
Do you have any commercial games that you have attached to the online account info?
- again they can update account info to a new account
Did you throw out all your old contacts and don't talk to your old friend network, parents, work or other contacts?
- your contact list is a pretty good identifier of you. This is what the NSA surveilance meta-data collection is all about.
Did you change your browsing practices? Use new news sites, forums, game and porn sites?
- again your browsing habbits are the meta data the NSA tracks
Did you change your phrase usage, captialization and misspelling style?
- again good identifiers of individuals

Reverse honeypots

[Solandri]

I've always maintained that passing laws to protect our privacy is a losing battle. If you make a law to make someone stop doing something they want to do, all that usually ends up happening is they figure out a way to do the exact same thing while skirting around the law.

Instead, we should pollute their data. Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data, at least from monitoring people's browsing habits.

Pay for it

[holophrastic]

If you don't want someone to amass your private data, why are you giving it to them for free in the first place, and why is your solution to keep doing so?

You're talking about e-mail. Buy your own e-mail server from any shared-server host out there. Pay for it. It'll cost you something like $20/month. POP, IMAP, and WebMail isn't difficult.

Quite frankly, if you've got a static IP (or buy one for a few bucks a month), you can just run your own from home.

If you want it to be yours, buy it. Welcome to ownership. And the moment you pay for it directly, there are countless laws to protect you and your information.

If you want free, then you're going to pay for it with your information instead of with your dollars. It's that simple. It's always been that simple.

You're concerned...?

[albacrankie]

I used to get ads featuring young ladies in skimpy underwear. Move on a few years, and now I get ads for 'mature' dating sites. These ads are extremely depressing. So much so that I suspect it's a euthanasian plot intended to make me top myself. It may succeed. And now you're suggesting I could fix things by changing my e-mail address. That may be even more depressing. Fuck it!!!!

A creepy anecdote

[ebunga]

For the longest time I had a fake facebook account, as did an acquaintance. Despite the fact that neither of those accounts were connected to our real lives, and the fake accounts did not follow each other, Facebook was able to suggest I may know my acquaintances brother...

Facebook is a stalker so dedicated to looking in your windows while masturbating in the bushes behind your house that it not only planted the bushes, but also built the house.