Protecting your Online Life, part 4 - Home Address
It has been easy for me to recommend that we protect our personal email, personal phone number, and our home wireless network in our online lives. Gonna shoot straight with you, my fourth item to protect is the most difficult for me to articulate the reasons why it is important. We are all consumers, and we all have gotten used to quick, frequent delivery of things we want. This fourth item takes a great deal of work to integrate in our lives. It adds an additional cost to our monthly budget. And it adds an additional layer of logistics to an already busy life of juggling work, family, friends, hobbies, and overall adulting.
I believe it is important for us to limit using our home residential address with our online activities whenever possible.
Many online businesses sell their customer information database to marketing companies. A number of these marketing companies will send letters, flyers, and other physical items to our home mailbox. I have purchased XXL mens clothing from online websites because that’s what fits my physique. I now receive catalogs and mailings from many “Big Man” clothing companies. These frequent deliveries move from my mailbox directly to the paper recycling bin. Even if I contacted the “Big Man” companies and request to be removed from their mailing list, I am wagering that my name and address will be added to yet another list of customers who actively respond, even if it’s to stop receiving communication. Sadly, there are large companies that are building a very detailed profile of my preferences, my interests, my purchase history, my political leaning, my sociological viewpoints, and other aspects of my personality based on my online web activity, all of which can be sold to other companies with algorithms configured for a high likeliness of viewing or purchasing a product via their targeted advertising. Adding my home address provides these companies one more chunk of information to their extensive dossier profile about me. In this case, my geographical location.
The Redirect
If we purchase items off Amazon, we don’t necessarily have to have them ship our items to our residential address. Amazon Hub Lockers are located in over 900 cities. Our items can be waiting for us in a secure location that would eliminate the concern of porch pirates or apartment neighbors from taking our deliveries.
Is it worth changing our shipping address on Amazon from our residential address to another address like our workplace, a family’s address, or a fake address? Probably not. I don’t believe Amazon would delete your residential address from its records given your past purchase history which contains your residential address in the ship to: information. Unfortunately, what’s done is done. Plus, if you were to provide Amazon with another shipping address, you would create yet another connection to their overwhelming profile information about you…which might be marketed to other companies for their targeted marketing purposes.
The Alternatives
Acquiring a Post Office box in your city, or a nearby city, costs about a dollar a day, depending on your city. I believe it is a solid way to prevent having to share your home residential address with most online websites. As I mentioned earlier, there is an increased layer of logistics to retrieve your mail from the post office location, but you do gain less likeliness of not having your home address floating around the internet.
Similarly, using a personal mailbox with a UPS Store in your city, or a nearby city, will undoubtedly be a higher cost than a P.O. Box. However, you are given an actual street address for your shipment, which may be required on some websites where a P.O. Box may not be accepted. Also, some UPS Stores have 24-hour access to your mailbox, which may be more convenient than the US Post Office’s business hours as the only time available to access?
The Darker Scenario
Perhaps more traumatic than the nightmare scenario I shared in an earlier newsletter, could involve strangers using open source intelligence (searching Google or visiting popular people search websites like Intelius, LexisNexis, Spokeo, or Whitepages) to locate my personal home address in order to…convey their disappointment with me in response to something I’ve done. For example:
I could make a lane change while driving, even using my blinker to signal the lane change, and not notice a car in my blindspot. The driver in my blindspot hits their brakes to avoid a collision, honks their horn for five consecutive seconds, loses their temper, and yells at me for being an idiot on the road. I raise my hand to wave in efforts to signal, “My fault, sorry about that,” but that now-emotionally-flooded driver perceives me flipping them off instead of waving, and now morphs into a vigilante road-rage mode. They write down my license plate. They arrive at home and contact either the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Police to acquire my home address. Once they know my residence, they can either visit me in person to make sure I’m fully aware of the anger I caused them from my lane change, or use social media to Doxx me. Doxxing is the process of gathering an individual’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and disclosing or posting it publicly, usually for malicious purposes such as public humiliation, stalking, identity theft, or targeting an individual for harassment.
Make no mistake: this scenario is high-risk but low llikeliness. Most of us will not encounter an incident where we are harassed or even attacked in our home. Unfortunately, I’m someone who has spent over quarter of a century in a field where I have to prepare for the worst-case scneario and have read numerous articles…daily…about the worst-case scenario happening to people and their technology, I am very cautious about encountering a traumatic incident where I am the target, or my family and friends are the target. If you happen to be concerned about your home address being available to people online from a simple Google search, I found pretty good success from this PDF workbook found on Michael Bazzell’s IntelTechniques.com website. For what it’s worth, I have gained most of my knowledge in online privacy and security from his books and podcast.
My mission with the Greyman Technology newsletter is to share ideas and options to decrease your odds of bad things happening to you online. I don’t have all the answers. And with the ultra-fast rate technology is evolving around us, what might be a reasonable plan of action today would be foolish six months from now. My hope is that you would consider what headaches might occur for you, and consider mindsets and methods that could decrease the pain of the headache, or even eliminate the headache altogether. I appreciate your time in considering the fourth item I believe we should be protecting in our online lives. Coming up next, I’ll be discussing the software I have chosen to adopt in my online life, and the devices I am currently using in efforts to decrease my visibility on the internet.
Thanks for your time,
- Chris