Seven Actions of the Digital Me: Article written to discuss several personal security items essential for consumers/users of the Internet. http://www.wrinkledbrain.net

1. Seven actions for the “digital me”
The CyberSecurity Place
by Guest Contributor , March 17, 2016 Expert Article
Link: https://thecybersecurityplace.com/seven-actions-digital/
By Dr. Ron McFarland, CISSP, PMP
We live in an electronically chronicled society. Like it or not, our recorded society, fostered by
computers, databases and analytics, provides each of us with many benefits and several potential
hazards. It’s a pretty well understood fact that emails, online shopping information, cell phone
calls, and Internet traffic is recorded – by someone on a database located somewhere. Whether it’s
your Internet Service Provider, Cell phone provider, your bank or utility company, someone is
storing your information, your data, and the “digital you” is recorded.
It is important for each one of us to understand the fundamental aspects of how much data is
collected, why it is collected and how it is generally shared. By developing awareness of how your
information is stored, collected, collated and shared, we can address any errors or assumptions
made by vast databases and programs about who we are, increasing our benefits for living in a
digital society and reducing the risks that can occur.
Many organizations record, save, and share pieces of data about you. Information and data known
about you and your buying patterns, web-surfing behaviors is retained by the conglomeration of
vendors where you do your online shopping, banking, credit card transactions, and a host of other
online activities. Collection of this information is necessary for organizations to provide you with
access to their large databases of products and services. Also, collection of your information is
essential to provide you with some level of information security that protects your information
from the prying eyes of highly trained and ill-intentioned hackers.
Demographics, Psychographics, and Trends – oh my!
Most of us may be familiar with the field of demographics. Just to clarify what demographics are,
it is the quantifiable characteristics about you. For example, your name, age, and address are
demographic attributes that are collected and stored in databases. Beyond demographics,
companies also save psychographic information about you. Psychographics is more formally
described as the collection of information about your interests, opinions, and even your lifestyles.
I’m interested in guitar playing, for example, so my psychographic profile indicated that I prefer
acoustic guitars.
Here’s another example how a company, say my local chain store grocery store might use my
information. When I signed up for a discount card at my grocers, they asked me to fill out a simple
form. The form asked for the usual information: name, address, phone number, email, and a few

2. other demographic pieces of data (data about me), which I gladly provided to obtain the weekly
discounts that the store offers. The demographic information that I provided is stored on a large
database file containing demographic information for everyone who signed up for the discount
card. In that way, the store can send out a weekly email flyer containing store specials to email
addresses or a printed flyer to the physical address of store customers.
Demographic and psychographic information can be used in a more robust approach to provide
the grocery store chain with marketing information for their customers. For example, when I go
into my local store every Friday to purchase my usual one-pound of wild-caught salmon and
favorite Irish beer, the grocery store’s database will recognize my purchasing trends and note these
as my shopping preferences. The store can actually send out a coupon to my email address when
salmon or my favorite Irish beer goes on sale.
The combination of demographic and psychographic information collected by our example
grocery store chain, can also help a grocery store chain with their overall individual store planning.
Trend information, what customers are purchasing at a given store, can provide a store chain with
valuable analytics to shape individual stores in a way to meet their customer needs. Have you
noticed that in the past fifteen years or so that some grocery store chains have created a few isles
of health food products as an offering to their customers? How this has been done is that grocery
stores recognized the trend for health food products over the past few decades. Several chains
examined their demographic information, which provided them with maps of where their
customers live for a particular store and cross-referenced this information with the stored
psychographic information that were trending in both the store and within the region. Analytics
revealed if a store could support a health food section by examining the trends. Demographics also
determine if the addition of a few aisles of health food products, which tend to run at a premium,
could be added to the store’s inventory mix.
Databases and Analytics – more of the techie stuff.
Databases are the essential background technology used by companies to store information about
you, transaction information about what you’ve purchased, consumed or traded. With today’s
technology, your information, saved by a given company, is usually not stored at one location.
Today’s highly sophisticated databases use analytics to meet the needs of their customers with the
intention to expand their customer base and consumer markets that the company serves. However,
the push is on for companies to share information about their consumers with each other to further
expand markets with complimentary products. So much information is shared about you between
companies with highly distributed databases located around the globe that organizations can with
reasonable accuracy, predict what you will purchase in the near future. This is referred to a
predictive analytics. Amazon, for example, is using predictive analytics (demographics,
psychographics and current trends) to predict or “shape” their inventory at their warehouses based
on projected future sales. Every Amazon warehouse has a particular mix of products kept on the
shelves for the area that the warehouse serves which will allow for quicker shipping. Imagine
Austin Texas and the music scene. Because of all of the guitar players around Austin, I can only
imagine that the Amazon warehouses that sever the area probably store more guitar strings than
many of the other Amazon warehouses around the country.

3. The cloud is everywhere.
Data about you is not only stored and shared on massive databases that organizations maintain,
but are also stored in large data pools hosted in diverse locations around the US and world. The
current method of storing and distributing data that many commercial organizations use is cloud
technology. Cloud technology allows for an organization to distribute your information anywhere
in ever-growing databases, typically in a private networks of databases that span United States or
even the globe. Your information is literally scattered around multiple sites that an organization
hosts.
The catch in cloud-based services is that not all organizations can afford their own vast ever-
growing networks of hardware to host and maintain their databases. Instead, many large, medium,
and small organizations will rent cloud space with a third-party cloud-based services company that
have the infrastructure to lease large amounts of space to companies. I liken this to my garage. I,
like many Americans, have quite a bit of storage in my garage. When I’ve run out of space, at
times, I’ve rented a storage space to hold my treasures. The catch is that with space for data or for
your things, you release control and trust of your assets to a third party.
Aside from the massive amount of data that a particular organization will keep and share about
you, whether on their own databases or on leased cloud-based services, information about you can
also be found on the various social media sites. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to name a few,
provide a rich source of data about you. We upload our pictures, videos, our poems and papers in
order to share these with our online friends and community. Our pictures, posts and papers provide
information about our preferences. I don’t know how many political posts I’ve responded to in the
past month, but this alone can provide certain information about my likes and dislikes as it pertains
to an event or political interest. In addition, files that are uploaded typically contain meta-data,
which is simply information about our location, earth coordinates, and other information about the
file, picture, or video. Meta data is like a fingerprint. In fact, the sheer volume of data that is
uploaded hourly on social sites is astounding. Over 300 hours of video alone is uploaded per
minute to YouTube. That’s a lot of video content that may contain telltale information about you.
And the social media companies, also willing to make a buck off of your information, gladly share
information about you to other social media companies and to businesses.
So where is the digital me?
The sharing of information about the “digital me” is at a fever pitch. Billions of dollars per year
are spent on sharing, collating, sorting, and relating information gathered from many sources. The
“digital me” is a composite of all data collected about my activities, purchases, preferences, and
activities scattered throughout social media, third-party cloud services and private organizations.
It is no wonder that security agencies have a hand into our profiles as they can project who may
be more prone to illegal and terrorist activities.
But there is a more fundamental problem with the conglomeration of information about the “digital
me.” Is the information about me accurate? A few years ago, I set up two profiles on my favorite
social media site. One of the account profiles I set up was for my very conservative side and
another account profile suggested that I was quite liberal. Of course, I pointed each of these

4. accounts to a different email that I had, and I used my first name for one account and my middle
name for the second account, so the setup was quite legit at the time. As I anticipated, based on
my profile information, I started receiving more conservative information to the conservative-
leaning account and more liberal information to the other account. The point is that marketing
companies obtained my preference information and my demographic information (email address,
age, etc.) from the social media website. My bet is that the social media site sold my information
for a few pennies and the digital me (both side of me) were sold to a third party company.
Decisions by algorithm, not people.
As noted earlier, many decisions are made by databases. Automated decision making and
predictive analytics is done by a set of programmed algorithms that most organizations use. When
I want to purchase a car, the credit agencies will use an algorithm that checks the “digital me”
including my credit risk and worthiness, with fairly good accuracy.
Algorithms are only as good as they are designed. Algorithms make an assumption that the data is
accurate. And there are bad algorithms that can be downright harmful. When an algorithm is
designed and used for decision-making, the algorithm will read in the data to its process that it has
access to. The algorithm typically does not determine the quality of the information, the accuracy
of the information nor the context of the information. In most cases, algorithms that make decisions
for us do not determine if mistakes have been made to the data that is being review if the data is
correct or not, the quality or verifiability of the accuracy of the information is, for the most part,
not considered. Imagine a scenario where your healthcare information is hijacked by a hacker. If
the hijacker can alter your information about who you are to your healthcare provide and receive
services, you may be on the hook for the services that you’ve received.
Keep the “digital me” clean.
Correction of data is difficult at best. It is hard to clean up our own digital data and to make
corrections. From this standpoint, digital data spreads like a disease. There are, however, some
precautionary measures that we can take to better assure that our data is more accurate. It takes
some effort and I recommend these actions:
1. Be security aware: Continuously be cautious about sharing your information with people,
emails, and organizations that ask for your information. Understand why they need the
information. If you receive an email, for example, from your bank asking you to update
your information, call the bank and ask them to send the request in writing.
2. Check your credit rating: I recommend checking your credit reports at least one time per
year. Credit reporting agencies, by law, must respond to your request to change credit
information in a timely manner. For example, if a credit card incorrectly reported that you
were late on a payment, you can request that (a) the credit card agency reverse the report
to the credit reporting agency and (b) request to the credit reporting agency that the report
on your file be corrected. Both the credit card company and the credit reporting agency
must respond to your request within a certain time limit or are required by law to change
their records about you.

5. 3. Use pass phrases: Passwords are easy to crack. You can search the web and literally find
dozens of password crackers that hackers use to provide access to your account. The shorter
the password, the easier it is to use. Instead, many companies are giving you the option to
provide either a password or a pass phrase. Choose the pass phrase, if you are given this
option and insist that your bank or credit card company use pass phrases, if they do not. A
pass phrase, as you probably already guessed, is a much longer password and is something
that is unique to you. Because of its length, it takes a hacker who is running password
cracking tools a lot longer. An example of a pass phrase would be something that is unique
to you and can look like: “I lov3 the University of Arizona basket ball te4m because they
are $tellar” (notice the use of a long, unique phrase with numbers and special characters).
4. Remove your hard drive when donating: Take out your hard drive before you donate
your computer. When I taught computer forensics courses a few years back, I’d purchase
a few computers donated to Goodwill. I’d remove the hard drives and would scan each
hard drive for strings of 16 digits. A string of 16 digits might reveal a credit card number.
If the software that I used found a 16 digit number, it would mark it for further inspection
once the entire disk drive was scanned. Later, the program would examine more closely
the 16 digit number to see if the first four digits were representative of a bank or a credit
card number. I’d demo this to my class and would discover that most hard drives at the
time contained several credit card numbers. And, if you think that you’ve deleted the hard
drive contents before you donated it to a worthy cause, keep in mind that there is software
that can recover deleted files on a hard drive. The best practice is to donate your computers
and laptops without the hard drive. Then, take the hard drive down to a computer store and
have them physically shred your drive (look for a computer store that has a hard drive
shredder, which is similar to paper shredders, but can chew up a chunk of metal).
5. Do not loan your computer: This sounds a bit harsh, especially when your friend is
looking to borrow your computer. But keep in mind that your friend may not be as careful
with your computer, which contains your data, as you might be. They may be tempted to
download software or visit websites that will install malware onto your computer and
malware is often written to steal your information and transmit it to another computer on
the web. I’ve run into this situation when repairing and restoring computers, especially in
a school setting.
6. Update, update: This is an item that we’ve heard of continuously from both software and
hardware vendors, but warrants emphasis. Operating system, application software and
hardware companies continuously seek to patch their systems for vulnerabilities and will
release updates often. Aside from the necessary virus protection that needs to be updated,
please be sure to check that your operating system and applications are updated frequently.
Most operating systems including the MacOS and Windows OS versions, will allow you
to set an automatic update where the operating system checks periodically and will install
critical patches that can provide additional security to your system.
7. Clean it out: When your computer begins to run sluggish and you’ve performed the
suggested vendor maintenance, if your computer still runs sluggish, do not hesitate to take
it to your computer technician to have her or him perform deep cleaning and inspection of
files and browser software. One of the symptoms of a virus (or many) on your computer is
that your system runs slow, browser windows open slowly, extra windows seem to pop up
out of no where, and you are prompted mysteriously. While you may take all efforts to

6. clean your system as required by the manufacturer, deep cleaning and scanning may be
necessary and can be readily done by a certified computer technician.
As a result of the massive amounts of data collected by computers, we each have a digital profile
– a “digital me” that identifies who we are, what we do, what we like and how we interact in the
world. The “digital me” is rapidly evolving by the rapid collection of information that you’ve
provided over the Internet to your banks, favorite shopping web sites, social media sites, and other
web sites that you visit weekly. Large massive databases that operate in the background share your
demographic, psychographic and trend information as well as your location and other related meta-
data. The soup of information that is collected about each of us creates a unique “digital me.” It is
essential that we constantly monitor what data is put into the process and clean up any data that is
incorrectly stored on databases like credit reporting data.
About the author.
Dr. Ron McFarland, CISSP, PMP is the Dean of Applied Technologies at the College of the
Canyons in Valencia, California, that has a robust Computer Networking and Cyber
Security program. He received his doctorate from Nova Southeastern University’s School of
Engineering and Computer Science. He also holds multiple security certifications including
the prestigious Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification
and several CISCO certifications. Dr. McFarland can be reached at:
ronald.mcfarland@canyons.edu