The nightmarish situation I described in my previous post – a work presentation featuring porn of yours truly – is (hopefully) unlikely to happen in real life. I keep a religious separation between my work laptop and my personal one that I use for posts like this. I also maintain very separate email identities, including one for work, one for my personal life and one for this blog. However, despite all that, it can sometimes be difficult to stop all information leakage. Technology companies have a vested interested in gathering information about you and connecting it together. The greater the number of datapoints they can correlate the more valuable that information is. Information = power = $1bn IPO.
I think the biggest risk at present is smart phones. They’re a nexus where many different streams of identities can meet. People may differentiate between work and home computers, but they don’t always do the same thing for the computer in their pocket. Which means software on it can potentially access your location, all your email accounts, all your phone records, all your text messages and all your social media. It’s typically possible to configure it not to do that, but technology companies have a vested interest in the information, so configuration defaults tend to be permissive in the data they expose.
My scariest information leak was due to my phone. I’d been using it to snap session photographs. It had also been set-up to access my personal email account and, unbeknownst to me, that meant it would also automatically upload photographs to a private storage space in the cloud. Nobody could see them, so in theory no big deal, right up to the moment I added that email account to a new work laptop. I didn’t think there was any danger because it wasn’t an account I used for anything blog, porn or BDSM related. It was just for chatting to friends and shopping online. But now there was a path for information to leak along. The final step in that path was a screensaver on the laptop that would rotate through photographs from your online photo albums. You can probably imagine what happened next. Luckily I was just chatting to a couple of people in my office when naked me appeared on the screen. I had chance to quickly shut the lid before anyone spotted anything. If I’d been projecting onto a big screen in a meeting it could have been a career limiting moment.
I’ll leave you with a couple capturing their own personal moment via their phone. Hopefully the leakage of this photograph onto the net was intentional.
