Darren Laur knows when I sleep. He knows my full name, address, birthday, birthplace, work history and the awards I have lost.
He knows how often I tweet. He has pictures of my house. He knows I play in a band (but not that I’m awful).
And yes, he knows my sleep patterns. Not quite sure how he figured that out. Something to do with algorithms and Twitter.
It’s all in a “digital dossier” built by Laur, who with son Brandon will be speaking about online security at the fourth annual Victoria Social Media Camp May 6-8.
I was a guinea pig for Laur, a Victoria police officer who with wife Beth runs a company called Personal Protection Systems. The idea was to show how easy it is for criminals and others to mine the Internet for information.
The Laurs spent 10 to 12 hours pulling apart the pages of my life. They spent almost as long on Melanie Friebel, a Social Media Camp board member, turning up everything from her favourite restaurants to the year she moved out of her childhood home. That’s the sort of stuff a fraudster can use to get close to you or your friends.
This wasn’t just some comprehensive Google search. They used sophisticated, free, readily available software to drill deeper and deeper into our lives, starting with nothing more than a name. Some call it “social engineering.” Others use terms like “doxing” or “catfishing.” I call it scary.
In my case, Darren Laur figured he could have stolen my identity and obtained a credit card in my name pretty easily. I’m not a particularly likely target, either.
Writing for a newspaper means I have thousands of stories posted online, creating a lot of “white noise” to sift through before finding useful information.
In this case, “useful” doesn’t imply blackmail material. “It’s not about dirt,” Laur says. “It’s about identity theft.” Bad guys aren’t looking for the skeletons in your closet. They’re looking to turn your good name against you.
Children as young as age seven have been victimized. In fact, they’re prime targets because of their lack of credit history. “The younger you are, the more virgin credit you have,” Laur says.
A fraudster can max out a credit card in a kid’s name with no one knowing until years later, when Junior goes to, say, apply for a student loan.
It frustrates Laur, a frequent presenter in schools, that kids are banging away on their iPads and mobile devices without a clue about the ways in which they’re making themselves vulnerable.
“I call it parental abdication,” Laur says. Mum and Dad don’t pay attention to what their kids are doing online because they don’t understand it themselves. It’s like giving them keys to the digital highway without teaching them how to drive.
It’s not that Laur wants us all to shun Facebook and Twitter, or whatever, but we do need to know how to keep ourselves safe.
The most important thing to remember: There’s no such thing as privacy. “Everything you’re doing now should be considered public, permanent and very searchable.” What’s the difference between a tattoo and a Facebook post? You can have a tattoo removed.
It’s not just criminals who mine your data. Universities and potential employers troll through the Internet to filter out applicants. Laur has clients who get him to build a digital dossier on themselves for defensive purposes, to be prepared for what’s floating around out there that could come back to bite them.
Big business will use filter bubbles, algorithms that use such factors as your location and online history to massage the results of your Internet searches, shaping them to reflect your interests — and what they can sell you. (Ever wonder how Netflix knows what kind of movies to suggest you watch?)
When Laur was in Nova Scotia recently, the advertising that popped onto his screen was for Halifax businesses offering the kind of goods and services that would interest him. It was as though his computer was watching him, knew where he was and what he liked.
In a way, it did. “The question I have is ‘who’s watching the watchers and what they’re doing with the info,’” he says.
There’s a question to sleep on.
