Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the Window

Lifehacker

I am an extremely private person. I don’t broadcast my location, I use privacy tools to keep advertisers from tracking me, and almost never give any app access to Facebook. Of course, a lot of people don’t have a problem with living publicly. I’ve always wondered what the benefits and downfalls of doing so are, so I decided to give it a three-week test run. Here’s how it went.

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of your privacy because your data is often used for ads you don’t know about, logged in databases you’ve never heard of, and used to find out where you are and what you’re doing. Some of the things I consider “radical public living” experiments are probably commonplace to you, but even so, my experience may give you a better insight into what you’re gaining—and potentially losing—with your choices. Let’s start by looking at my experiences with location-sharing every move I made and then move on to the data collected by my browser. Finally, we’ll close by handing all this information over to a third party and seeing what type of demographic picture gets formed.

Broadcasting Every Move In the Real World

Location-sharing apps like Foursquare have been popular for a while, but I’ve never ventured down that path because I didn’t like the idea of my friends (and strangers) knowing where I was, what I was eating, or who I was with. It just seems like an odd thing to broadcast to the world to me. However, I picked a few apps and started doing it anyway. Here’s a breakdown of what I signed up for:

• Foursquare for checking in to public places and letting everyone know where I am.
• Forecast is a tool that checks you in automatically, which was important because I forgot to do it at first.
• Banjo is an app that aggregates a variety of social feeds to update friends and strangers to where you are and what you’re doing.
• Set Locations/Permissions/Notifications for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook so they would display my location info publicly and interact properly with Banjo.
• Spotify Sharing so that everyone knows what I’m listening to at every point in the day.

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