Your Loved Ones are Ruining Your Online Privacy

“Never share the view outside your window on the internet, or else creepy people will be able to find you”. Some of you may have heard this piece of internet safety advice before but disregarded it as far-fetched paranoia. I felt the same way until I stumbled across a video by Yuval. Yuval’s TikTok page features multiple videos of him accurately – and consensually – pinpointing another user’s location on Google Maps, based on a video of their surroundings (see here, for example). Many commenters and I agreed that this was quite unsettling, but soon enough Yuval took it one step further. He uploaded a video in which he was able to figure out what hotel someone was staying at, once again based on nothing more than a video of their surroundings. Two days ago, he managed to find a restaurant based on a video of their food. Now you may be thinking that people like Yuval are the minority. Most people don’t know how to do things like this. If you ask me, it only takes one unsavory person to acquire this skill before things go wrong. Thankfully, I barely post online, which means I’m safe from all this cyberstalking… right?

Finding you through your friends and family

Wrong. Enter Khan. Khan makes TikToks, in which she finds commenters’ personal information, mainly names and birthdays. Most commenters have a minimal amount of information on their account: generic profile picture, no real name, a few videos if any, etc. Despite these precautions, Khan still frequently manages to find what she’s looking for. In this video, for instance, Khan uncovers the name and birthday of TikTok user ‘JD’ whose profile is pretty bare. She does this by going through their following list to find any profiles JD is a frequent commenter on. This leads her to their cousin. The cousin posts a lot more frequently, and has her full name on her TikTok profile, allowing Kahn to find her Instagram as well. Pictures on Instagram lead her towards yet another person’s Facebook and, finally, ‘JD’ (or Jace)’s name and birthday. (Interestingly, one way in which Khan confirmed she had the right person was by comparing a picture of a dog on Facebook to one featured in one of JD’s two videos. Guess you have to keep an eye on your canine companions as well). 

Being careful is not enough

What this illustrates is that no matter how private and cautious you are on the internet, all it takes for your information to be readily available online is for someone close to you to be a bit more open. Looking back at Yuval’s content, if your friend were to capture their day on Instagram stories and at some point mentions you’ve been with them all day, all information shared by them may as well have been shared by you. If people know where your friend is, they know where you are. Similarly, if you get tagged in a post by a close relative who shares way too much, a lot of personal information (like what town they live in) about them is also personal information to you.

So, our loved ones are ruining our online privacy. Now what? You can hardly keep up with every post, comment, retweet, etc. made by everyone you know. You probably don’t even want to do that. Once something is on the internet, it’s out of your control. In the current age of the internet, it’s very difficult to stay cool and mysterious™; except now it’s not just your own digital footprint you have to focus on, but that of everyone you’re close to as well. If such matters even concern you, that is.