Vanishing in the Digial Age

When I read the story of Wired writer Evan Ratliff's attempt to alter his identity and hide away for a month, I was shocked at how much information his pursuant's were able to conjure up. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Wired challenged writer Evan Ratliff to change his identity and offered a $5,000 reward for anyone that could find him, take his picture, and say the secret code "fluke". The magazines editor would place a crumb trail online of information that a detective would be able to dig up on a person i.e. bank accounts, credit transactions, social media accounts, and phone records. From this the pursuant's would try to piece together his new identity and whereabouts.

The crazy stuff people eventually tracked down about him online included: all of his previous addresses in the U.S., detailed information about his entire family, his childhood nicknames, his cats names, his favorite mechanic and authors, that he had celiac disease, his signature on a deed to his apartment in New York, and his purchasing habits. In fact a lot of this information is posted about all of us all over the web. Don't believe me? Google your name and see what comes up. For those of you that are unlucky like me and have a uncommon name, you're a pretty easy target. Sites such as www.123people.com and www.isthisyour.name scour the internet collecting information about whomever they can find. I'm sure i'll be getting Google Alerts for this blog posting in a matter of months. They are still showing up for my blog posts in Bud Gibson's (link is cached by Google) class a few years ago...

Getting back to Ratliffs story, it didn't take long for a devoted group to set out to track Ratliff down. One individual setup a web-forum where other searchers could share clues and ideas. A twitter tag was created and trackers could tweet their latest trails and data. Another person created a facebook application to try to track down Ratliff. Smart enough to know that he could use this to his advantage, Ratliff frequented the sites to see if anyone was hot on his trail or off following the diversions he created. He had a close call in Atlanta where, upon landing at the airport, he checked the twitter account and realized people where already there looking for him. Eventually his traffic to these sites would be his demise. The facebook application logged users IP addresses and the developer eventually tied Ratliff and his false identity attached to the IP address.

So did Ratliff manage to vanish in a digital age? I recommend reading the article to find out exactly what happened to him. What I will say is that it would be interesting to see what the results would be if someone kept a lower profile then he did (which was already pretty low). He did a good job avoiding traceable transactions by using cash and Visa gift cards as credit cards. But you can only last so long on cash alone. Another issue he had was the use of I.D. To really succeed at disappearing, you would need to find a way to totally create a new identity complete with new I.D.'s or just move to some remote place in the mountains.