Surprise, surprise: my online metadata actually reveals where I've been
In January 2014, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that a Canadian spy agency used a unique identifier to follow thousands of Canadians as they moved about the country. The tracking all originated from an unnamed airport.
It got us thinking: how hard would it be to replicate this little experiment, writ small? Could I use one of my own online identifiers as a way to track my own movements through time and space? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is: yes. It’s easy to do, and it’s revealing about what I do, when I do it, and where I go.
Like many other websites, Ars Technica employs a system of voluntary user logins. These logins allow you to do things like leave comments at the bottom of every story and engage in our user forums. Each time you log in to Ars, we record the date, time, and IP address that you logged in from. This is a common practice: nearly every website maintains similar records. Typically though, Ars only keeps one record per user of the last date, time, and IP address used. We do not keep any historical records of login data.
