43Craigslist, like buy a bicycle, and it’s a one-and-done. Use it,
and throw it away.”
I had decades of digital exhaust to clean up. “Your data
across different companies is being pulled together by data
brokers and ad companies. If the government asked for it and
spent some time correlating, it probably wouldn’t be that far
off from what the Chinese government has,” says Rob Shavell,
the co-founder of Abine Inc., a company in Cambridge, Mass.
I signed up for Abine’s DeleteMe service, paying $129 a year
for it to opt me out from databases run by brokers that sell
my personally identifiable information. I gave DeleteMe all my
current and previous home addresses, phone numbers, and
email addresses, and it removed me from 33 public-records
crawlers—database services with names like Intelius and
Spokeo, plus a whole lot of yellow pages.
Pierre Valade, a French graduate of Stanford’s design school
living in New York, designed the Jumbo app for the iPhone in
April. I gave it permission to access my Twitter, Google, and
Alexa accounts, and a cute cartoon elephant (he’s got a bad
memory, unlike Big Tech) got to work scrubbing away my past.
In 10 minutes, all my tweets older than a month vanished, as
did all my Google searches and Alexa requests. Jumbo also
adjusted more than 40 Facebook settings to protect my pri-
vacy, something I would’ve had to spend several hours figuring
out. “Even me, on Facebook to design that feature, I got bored.
It’s too much work,” Valade says. He’s trying to get Facebook
Inc. to allow Jumbo users to erase their timelines all at once,
but the company won’t give him the API to do that. “Do they
have two PR strategies? One where they say to Congress and
theWashington Post, ‘We’re good guys,’ and another where
they’re not helping us build what we want?” he asks me. I don’t
have an answer, because I’m avoiding Facebook. Also because
it didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Before I asked people which gadgets to buy, I had to make
sure my digital trail was private and secure. I switched to the
ad-blocking, non-data-recording Brave browser (headquar-
tered, unfortunately, in San Francisco and, worse yet, run
by Palo Alto native Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla
Corp. and created the JavaScript coding language). I aban-
doned Google, using the DuckDuckGo search engine from
outside of Philadelphia because it doesn’t track me or cus-
tomize my search results. I also started communicating via
Signal, a free app that encrypts both ends of text and voice
messages. I was surprised by how many messages I was glad
to hide from posterity: one about a former co-worker who’s
a drunk; another from someone who wanted to be expunged
from my upcoming book. Then I realized that Signal is located
in Mountain View, Calif.
So I downloaded Burner, an app run out of Los Angeles by
my friend Greg Cohn. It allows users to pay $5 a month to mask
their phone numbers with the area codes of their choice. As
long as the FBI doesn’t ask Cohn for my call log or texts, he
assured me that no one will know what I’m up to. On April
Fools’ Day, I sent my wife a text from a fake local number claim-
ing to be a dad at our kid’s school, saying he’s got a crush on
her. This, I found out when she got home and for the next few
very loud hours, wasn’t a good use of Burner.
As a 47-year-old married guy, I thought I didn’t need a tool
to hide photos. Then I typed in takeout.google.com, down-
loaded the seven years of data it stores about me, and opened
the Google Photos folder. It contained photos I had attached
in emails, including bills with my credit card numbers. All that
data and more is in Apple’s iCloud. So I downloaded one of
the many fake calculators that hide photos. Calculator+ Secret
looks and acts just like the regular iPhone calculator, only when
I punch in my password and the percent sign, it opens up a
bunch of folders. I threw in my passport, my driver’s license,
and blank checks, hoping to one day have better things to hide.
To spend money on gadgets online without being tracked,
I needed a card without my name on it. Which is easy to
do. Abine, the company that makes DeleteMe, has a product
called Blur that lets you create virtual debit cards with no
name on them, just a number. So does Privacy, a company
in New York started by Bo Jiang, a former research assistant
at the MIT Media Lab. In the same way that MySudo offers an
email for every part of your life, Privacy issues virtual cards
for different online uses. Perhaps a subscription I might for-
get to cancel. Or a purchase I’d rather no one sees itemized.
Or that 23andMe information I would have preferred not to
attach to my real name. Also, it would be nice to know thatBloomberg Businessweek TECHLASH August 12, 2019
The author in Kate Bertash’s ALPR all-over-print shirt, $35, and in Selvaggio’s mask ▼