How I hacked my own life
Inspired by Evan Ratliff's outstanding article, Vanish, in which he tried to hide from an international crew of internet detectives for 30 days, I decided to investigate just how much I could discover about myself using only the free array of services that the web has to offer.
The quest begins ..
I allowed myself only one starting point: my name. My name which is, unfortunately in the Google age, rather unique. Googling myself turns up my LinkedIn account at the top of the pile. In less than 30 seconds we have discovered what I do for a living, where I work and where and when I went to university. So far so good but what about getting some really useful information like my age? Well I don't list my age on LinkedIn but it isn't too hard to figure out from the dates of my education although, without an actual birth date, this information is probably only marginally useful.
So, back to Google and it appears that I've got 2 Twitter accounts. One is locked down (as is the cache) but the account name seems pretty unique and this hunch is proved correct when a bit of Googling brings you to a related website and a quick WHOIS gleefully spits out my home address.
Now I have my name, year of birth, place of employment and home address. Now, apart from my address, I'm not that worried about that information being out there on the web because, really, it seems like the kind of stuff that you could get your hands on in real life without too much effort.
But then I have a terrible thought: I've so far assumed that the key bit of information that was keeping me safe was my birthday. I've always been careful to obscure it from public facing sites, even choosing to fill in a false one on occasion (a move that permanently locked me out of my Flickr account when I forgot my password) but I start to get a sinking feeling that I might have actually tweeted about my birthday. I slavishly scan through my tweets and, sure enough, there it is: a big, flashing, publicly available neon sign that says 'THIS IS MY BIRTHDAY'.
Oh dear. Life = well and truly hacked.
The problem with privacy
Although not as true as it always was, for a long time websites with logins relied on your birthday as the key piece of identifying information that differentiated you from an impostor. Before social media kicked off it was a fairly reliable assumption that only you and a handful of friends and family would know your birthday and enough about you to answer any other security questions. Now that social media has grown up it is relatively simple to find identifying information about people; anyone who picked 'what is the name of your pet' for their security question could probably do with an urgent search through their social media presences to see if they've ever let it slip (handy hint: you have).
Now that we're living our lives online with more and more transparency as well as experiencing more incentives and reminders to share what we're doing, we should revamp the way we protect our online identities. Security achieved through 'secret' personal information is just a comforting daydream in the modern media age. For those of us that spend our lives on the web it is time to start hacking ourselves and seeing just what we discover.
The engineer Claude Shannon famously said of security design that you should assume that "the enemy knows the system". Well, now the system is you and you need to find a better way to protect it.
Next week I'll be sharing my tips on improving data security that I learnt as a result of researching this article. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss it.
‘Dixons: The last place you want to go’ parodied by Big Al’s Creative Emporium
Last month I wrote about Dixons' 'honest' tube ads that claimed that people went to department stores for advice and customer service but came to Dixons for a good price. I thought that the ads were probably too big a gamble for Dixons (Craig Inglis, head of brand communication at John Lewis, seemed as surprised as me that 'another business would try to make a virtue of the fact they didn't have anything like a comparable service') but I also thought that the campaign would get people talking about the brand.
Other advertising agencies certainly seem to have taken an interest in the series of ads with Soho-based outfit, Big Al's Creative Emporium, producing this delightful parody.
Dixon's tube ad parody by Big Al's Creative Emporium
It's unclear whether this was actually a campaign or just the design team horsing around in the office but either way, I like it.
How Ricky Gervais wrote Coke their best ever ad
The new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying, casts the comedian as a man who invents lying in a world where everyone else can only tell the truth. Although it deals with various themes one of the film’s best jokes is the way it portrays big brand advertising in a world where marketing exists without the tools of exaggeration, cherry picked facts and, that old favourite, the lie of omission. I was so intrigued by the film’s take on an honest Coca-Cola ad that I had a go at mocking it up in Photoshop:
Coke: It's basically just brown sugar water
And to show there wasn’t any kind of bias against Coke the filmmakers also took the time to level a satirical swipe at Coca-Cola's main competitor whose fictional ad agency were compelled to deliver an even more damning creative: 'Pepsi. For when they don't have Coke.'
I've talked before on my blog about the trend of honesty in advertising and Ricky Gervais has certainly taken this modern marketing technique to its natural conclusion. Although many will be certain that we'll never see an ad for Coke that confesses that ‘it’s basically just brown sugar-water’, I for one would get a kick out of big companies having the faith in their brand to lay out the basic truth about their products.
It may be a risky strategy for a corporation like Coca-Cola but I've got a feeling that an ad like that would give them licence to run an incredibly satisfying and successful follow up campaign: 'Coke is just brown sugar-water. Coke drinkers don't care.'
Lego augmented reality kiosk is AR at its best
Lego, and augmented reality company Metaio, have developed an augmented reality kiosk that will show you an animation of your whatever Lego contraption you wave in front of it. And of course it's better than an animation because it's an animation superimposed in the real world.
Initially this is just going to sell a boat load of Lego but the future applications of this are staggering as a promotional tool. What if Lego develop an app that allows you to overlay Lego sets and pieces over a base in your living room? You can glimpse your Lego creation before you even take the bricks out of the box.
Kids and adults will be enthralled by this kiosk and it is a perfect example of a company doing augmented reality right: the customers love it, the press love it and it'll awaken the imagination of a new generation of tech-savvy Lego block builders.
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About
Tom Hubbard-Green is the E-marketing Executive at Alzheimer's Society and a freelance technology journalist.
His articles have been published in a variety of magazines and industry publications including Figaro Digital, O2 Venue magazine and City magazine.
Top 5 tips for protecting your data online (and getting an imaginary pet dog)
5. Use your imagination
Image: R Philipson (Flickr)
Lots of sites are still using bad security questions and it's an easy way to get your account swiped. Common questions like 'what is the name of your pet?' and 'what is your mother's maiden name?' are actually pretty easy to get the answers to. Friends with your mum on a social network or like to tweet about your cat? Yeah, you're busted.
The way to get around this is simply to use your imagination. I always pick the 'what is the name of your pet?' question because I don't actually have a pet but I do have an imaginary dog. Only I know his name and since he's not real he never appears in photos on Facebook or does something cute I need share on Twitter. He is my imaginary password recovery dog and you shouldn't wait until Christmas to get one.
4. Use KeePass and go crazy with the long passwords
If you don't have an imagination or you do and your imaginary dog is called "password" you can use the program KeePass to securely hold a list of passwords and even generate random ones for you. KeePass has one master password which allows you to copy and paste your other passwords into your browser. This way you only need to remember one password so you can make the others as complicated and as unhackable as you want.
3. Don't let your online accounts go solo
Where possible, always link a secondary email address to an account. Gmail lets you do it and it's a great idea. Even if your password gets compromised it can be possible to get your account back this way. And since another password secured account is safer than a security question you're better off having it this way. Just don't have the same password for your primary and secondary email addresses.
2. The password is dead! Long live the passphrase!
A password (emphasis on 'word') can be brute forced especially if your password is a word in the dictionary. Far more difficult to get at are passwords that are strings of words put together - passphrases. A string of random words is tricky to remember but if you pick a sentence it's much easier to recall. "ThisIsMyExcellentWorkPassword" with some numbers and punctuation in it is actually a pretty good password.
1. Hack yourself
My recent article, 'How I hacked my own life', showed that there is a staggering array of information available about you on the internet. I found pretty much everything I needed in order to give someone a good shot at cracking open some of my online events.
Only by actively trying to hack your accounts can you really be sure how it easy it is to get into them and only by looking through your public social media presences can you know what information you've divulged that might be used to crack open your online world.
Next week I lay into the 3 most irritating ads of 2009. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss out.