I began my career as a skip tracer long before technology was held in our hands.
For those not in the know, a skip tracer locates people.
I sat in a bare office with pink walls on 25th Street in New York City, hunting people over the phone. This was back when databases were limited to credit reports, driving records, criminal records, and personal accounts like telephone and utilities.
What made me a fierce skip tracer was that I was also a social engineer, but in my day we called it gagging and pretexting.
It was not difficult to call phone carriers and utility companies as the target, or as a worker, to extract the information I needed.
It is not the work that was important, but what I learned: how to listen, how to talk, and how to manipulate a conversation to extract information.
These were the ingredients of how I found people who did not want to be located.
It was far from brain surgery, and I always said finding people was about chipping away at information. Information people left behind. People who might know bits and pieces.
That is where the gold lies.
Human Privacy Expert
When I began disappearing people, there was an obsession with digital footprints.
The next thing I noticed was that every media interview and potential client wanted to discuss how to erase their digital footprint.
I got sick of it because people were missing the point of privacy, and human privacy at that.
I wrote about this in Human Privacy: When Technology Is Not the Real Threat.
It is not the digital footprint that comes knocking on your door. It is a human being.
And that is who you should protect against.
That is also why I ask the question: If Cybersecurity Protects Technology, Who Protects You?
If you need real privacy help, think about human privacy, because not doing so may be the mistake.
When I protect clients, I look into their lives and their connections. I look for what AI or a program may not find: the left-behind piece of information that brings the human to your front door.
That is the thinking behind my Disappear Privacy work.
FA@FrankAhearn.com
I Was A Skip Tracer
I wrote I Was A Skip Tracer about the years I spent finding people and the methods, conversations, and thinking that shaped the privacy work I do today.