A Ghost in the Machine
“You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy-com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else. Harris has likewise strictly limited access to his work and personal phone numbers by associating his main phone with up to 10 different numbers … When using Uber, he provides an intersection near his house as his pickup or drop-off point. For food deliveries, he might give a random neighbor’s address and, after the order is accepted, message the driver, ‘Oops, I typed out the address wrong. Let me know when you’re here, and I’ll run out.'” And this is all just for starters when it comes to a privacy and security company CEO’s efforts to maintain what used to be a relatively normal level of anonymity. But these days, our privacy has been all but eliminated. Who you are, where you live, what you buy, how much you pay, your health, your interests, the shows you watch, the people you associate with, your location, your politics, the sites you visit, every breath you take, every move you make; all of it is tracked, shared, sold, and easily accessible. But what if you wanted to be a little more private? It’s possible. But it’s not easy. Benjamin Wallace in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How to Disappear. (Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of this modern condition than the fact that a guy who has deployed every imaginable tactic to remain invisible is the star subject of an article that describes all of his habits.)
