While doing research for part of a book I’m working on, I’ve been learning a lot of interesting things about self-profiling, or how, by our every day actions, we’re adding to an overall profile of very personal information about ourselves.
In the book, the main character tries to re-invent his life in an effort to add more excitement and adventure. As part of that re-invention, he basically shuts down his life in one country and moves to another, leaving as little of himself behind as possible.
I won’t go into any more detail about the book, I’ll just outline some of the things I’ve found while doing my research.
Anything and everything people do today leaves behind information. If you go to a store and use a credit or debit card, not only is there an itemized list of the things you purchased as well as the date and time, but there’s likely to be surveillance video of you entering the store, how you act and what you do while inside the store and of you leaving. Oftentimes there’s also video of the vehicle you’re driving and it’s license plates.
It doesn’t stop there. If you go to your bank or any ATM machine, go through a coffee shop drive-thru or most urban street intersections, you’re on video.
Now this tracking information and video is all stored in different databases for different reasons. The store surveillance tapes are used if there’s criminal activity like shoplifting or a robbery. The cash register keeps a record of what you bought and at what time for the store’s records, inventory control, taxes and other financials, etc. The credit card or debit card info is needed to debit money and transfer it to the store’s accounts and also for banking records, so even though it seems scary when you think about how much info is collected about you and your shopping trip, it’s not like someone is sitting in an office singling you out and watching your every move. The data is fragmented.
But if necessary, someone with authority like the police or a government organization could collect all that information and build a startlingly precise profile detailing your every move, and why you do what you do in your daily life.
Lets do a run-through, shall we? 
A 29 year old divorced woman with no children has gone missing. After 24 hours using only electronically collected data and without searching the woman’s home or interviewing friends, family or co-workers, here’s what a police investigation can turn up:
1. Birth certificate showing the woman’s name, her parent’s names, where she was born, birth date, etc.
2. Social Security number which leads to detailed tax records, bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, education like colleges or courses and other training, etc.
3. The above would also lead to drivers licences, cars owned, a complete history of where she has lived since birth, library cards, frequent flyer cards, retail cards, utilities like landline phones and phone records, cell phones and records, power, water and gas bills, whether she was renting or owned a home at the time of her disappearance, etc.
4. Now that we have all her background info, it starts to get more interesting.
She buys groceries with her credit card which has the store location, date and time of her last purchase, plus a transaction number that can be paired up with the sales records at that store. With this info, we can pull the store reciept and see exactly what our missing woman bought two days before her disappearance. She likes healthy but convenient food, buying things like ready-made salads and pre-cut fruit, as well as fish like shrimp and tuna. She likes her coffee strong, buying expensive robusta beans and grinding them at home.
Whole grain cereals and power bars top off the list of food items, but while there she also picked up vacuum bags, a lint brush, toilet bowl cleaner, dry cat food and tampons. Yes, very personal info. Go back a few months through those credit card purchases and a cop could pretty accurately map out the missing woman’s menstrual cycle on a calendar based on when she usually buys her personal items.
The store surveillance tape reveals some other details. While shopping, she wore black leggings, flat sandals, a pink top with a hood and her dark hair with lighter highlights was in a loose ponytail. As she made her way around the store collecting her groceries, she didn’t do much browsing. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted and quickly but unhurridly gathered her items, with no grocery list. This would indicate she’s a well organized person or a creature of habit, only stopping a couple times to check text messages and reply using a touch-screen phone.
Phone records indicate that her phone was a Samsung Omnia and she replied to three text messages from a 30 year old male who was at a stationary location approximately 7 miles from her, according to cell tower triangulation data. Records also indicate that she had received several dozen texts and 6 calls from the man in the past 30 days. Hmmmm…
Instead of heading straight home from the grocery store, she drove her 3.5 year old silver colored Honda Accord sedan to a local coffee shop, passing a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts along the way. At the drivethru she paid for her 12oz skinny latte by tapping her MasterCard on the terminal outside the serving window. 2 blocks away, while turning right onto the main street leading into her neighborhood, a camera at the intersection caught her turning wide and jumping into the center lane without using a turn signal.
One hour and 29 minutes later, her home internet service provider recorded her 15.4 inch Toshiba laptop with a screen resolution of 1280X800 and Windows Vista Home Ultimate OS logging onto Facebook using a Firefox 3.5 browser. Seconds later, she logged into a gmail account containing over 1000 archived messages, no doubt some of them containing other revealing info about her likes, dislikes, people she knows and companies or online services she’s dealt with over the past couple of years or so.
A cursory look at her public Facebook and Twitter profiles reveals just over a hundred photos of her, some of her alone, some with both male and female friends, all tagged and interlinked to their own accounts and their accounts lead to other social networking profiles they own.
She also has a Youtube account with 22 videos. Some of the videos are vlogs where she’s talking about personal things and feelings. Some of the videos were shot on a beach during a vacation just over a year ago. The photos on Facebook and her ramblings on Twitter reveal a near complete story of her trip, who she interacted with as well as key aspects of her personality.
Her entire world is now wide open for further investigation.
——
I could go on and on but I’ll stop here.
All of the above info and volumes more can be collected by any law enforcement agency within a matter of hours.
The basics like birth certificate, SSN, drivers license and credit cards can lead to everything else and the blanks can be filled in using credit card purchases, surveillance cameras and social networking profiles.
For the purposes of research and character development for my book, the info I’m finding and stringing together is not merely helping me set the scene for what the main character does as he’s trying to erase his former life and start anew, it’s helping me piece together the character himself, right down to imagining what brand of shaving cream he uses and how it smells – important info the feds could use if they ever had to look for him