The Anonymity Experiment, a longish read about privacy in the 'real world'

For people who want to play along at home:

Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant (4).

It would be easy to do this for a week. Using a cell phone is my only major violation (well, and I don't go around in a tinfoil hat to evade cameras).

Real trick would be to work, get paid and cash checks without involving your real name.

http://bejata.com/arts/images/ep33_stringer_avon1.jpg

my gf and i were just arguing about this over dinner last night.

google (or your search engine of choice) + yr isp have way more info amassed on you than our various intel agencies would care to assemble. the nsa neither knows nor cares what kind of porn you like. google knows, and tries to sell you your favorite kind!

why was there an argument?

Basically she thinks my position (outlined above) is "defeatist" and that people should be doing what they can to maintain their privacy.

Me = lol "privacy" in INTERNET ERA?
her = omg i do not want pictures of my (hypothetical) children on the internet it is risky

people should be doing what they can to maintain their privacy

i.e. exactly the sorts of things the woman in this article does

where are you going to get money if not from an ATM? In moments of paranoid lunacy / bank-hating ire / being unfunny, I consider buying a safe, but even then you'd be traceable by the regular emptying of the bank account. No one just hands you big wads of cash these days. :(

i was just at passport control at the Atlanta airport and they did not look at my passport. they asked me to stand on a spot and look at a camera. after about 10 seconds the guy asks me if i am in fact Tracer Hand. i say yes. he says, have a nice day. wtfffffffff

Anybody else experience this before?

If you think about it, what's the difference between a human looking at a photo, typing a number into a computer, and then seeing everything. Not much. So I don't know why I was so skeeved out but I was

Looking into the camera seems pretty standard now...
Not even checking your passport is weird though...

the difference is knowing you're in a US govt facial recognition database whose use isn't nec limited to the cameras they have in passport control

but yes passports figure prominently in any history of surveillance

Yeah the biometric passports have the photo embedded in the chip you scan at those egates, so the gate reads the data and compares it with your face on the camera. Guessing the difference is as you allude to, they have access to a biometric database at immigration entering the US? Assuming they’d have checked you if you were a foreigner, they did to us ofc. Most EU passports with the exception of Ireland’s have fingerprint data on the chip as well.

I didn’t scan my passport anywhere though, that’s the thing! In the past I have done, at little kiosks, but this was not like that. Just join the queue, stand on a spot, look into the camera and off you go

if you'd said "that's not me" maybe we'd have some answers to this mystery

“that’s not me”

“yes it is, sir. now please be on your way”

XPs that’s what I’m saying, US immigration clearly has the database built in and they just compared your face to the database using the camera

"And so you're Tracer Hand."

"Well that's not my actual name but--"

"ILX stands for Immigration Loophole Xcellence; we know you."

"That's not how you spell--"

"SB, FP."

i was talking to a friend of my parents about this today and he said the difference is that if you're attending an anti-nuclear weapons protest you're not holding your passport up the entire time. Which is true. And I was musing like hmm, how porous though is that database. And he immediately said, grinning, "100%. 100% porous."

Ned, you joke, but -