Finding your birthday

Your identity

Do a Web search of sites, images, and videos associated with your name.

Does AI know anything embarrassing about you??

Powned?

Type the email address you use to register with most services into Have I been Pwned.

Personal search

• Do a TruePeopleSearch search of your (or perhaps your parents’) name or phone number. (Do not confirm any information or pay for any extra services.)

. . .

Are you surprised?

What can you do?

• occasionally check your information
• watch or lock credit reports at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion

HTTP headers

GET /privacy-tool.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
Referer: https://reagle.org/joseph/ob-web/.../Privacy_footprint.html
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (Win98; U)
Cookie: userID=id456578
Accept: image/gif, image/jpg, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en-US  
Connection: Keep-Alive
....

Browser fingerprint

Use Cover Your Tracks to see how uniquely identifiable you are.

clickclickclick.click

What can you do?

. . .

• uBlock Origin Lite, or specific blockers
  • cookie manager (Vanilla)
  • ad blocker (Adblock Plus)
  • javascript manager (Script Defender)
• other tools (EFF’s badger)
• Virtual Private Network (VPN)

VPN is a proxy

1. Can evade censorship (school) and local monitoring (ISP)
2. Can be slow and banned (Facebook, Netflix, Wikipedia)

Check search activity

Check timeline in Google Maps

Check the Google Ads Preferences

What is the algorithm inferring about you (e.g., gender and age)?

What can you do?

. . .

• regularly disable services not being used
• regularly review information and purge

Check what you are sharing

Are apps listening?

• Facebook wasn’t listening to target ads
• but many apps were listening to your TV
  • and TVs have listened to people
• ads do track what you are interested in, what you are doing, and who and what you are near
• apps were taking screenshots (Haridy 2019)
• Apple contractors could hear accidental and sensitive Siri recordings (Lawler 2025)

Is TikTok listening?

“One powerful signal”

where you linger — down to the second

Go around: What surprised you? 🎲

For the better?

For worse?

Student assignments

Wrap-up

If you could recommend to a friend or relative one thing about protecting their privacy, what would it be?

If you could recommend to a friend or relative one thing about protecting their privacy, what would it be? ▶