Can I Create or Obtain a Personal Bot to Get my Identity Back?

In early 1990, I began attending The American University in Washington DC while a dear friend continued as an undergrad at Santa Clara University in California. Thanks to her having remarkable computer savvy, she came up with a brilliant method for us to communicate with one-another across the country without the extraordinary price of long distance telephone calls. We went into the University's mainframe systems Lab in August of 1990 and she showed me how to utilize Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), to chat with one another on two computers.  It was amazing at the time and it was a good way to stay in touch. A few weeks later, I was typing to my friend when suddenly, another conversation began….”Hi! I’m Mark. Where are you?”  I replied, “I’m Rebecca and why are you on my computer?” He worked for an Intelligence Community Agency and we went on to become very good friends. I learned relatively quickly that the Intelligence Community, US Military and Academia were all suddenly connected in this metaphoric web of circuits that became the predecessor to the “Internet” then the “World Wide Web” and the massive expansions that put us where we are today. All of a sudden, the computers communicated together, electronic messages went back and forth, then money was being “wired” around the globe, from banks to Automatic Teller Machines and my checking account moved money around a lot faster than snail-mailing a paper check to a creditor or a utility.

When it was happening, it seemed to be moving at a natural pace, then it began accelerating to the point where my entire world became surrounded by computers and everything in my life became electronic data moving from point to point (right down to typing this on a desktop in a federal office right now).  At this point, it seems obvious and somehow tragically hilarious to me whenever I read about massive security breaches in banks, corporations, the Office of Personnel Management for the entire Federal Government, and even the agencies who were to provide the checks on my credit rating (Experian, Equifax, etc.) were not going to be up to the task and that most if not all of my personal information has been compromised to the point of no return.  Friends and family and pundits all are reeling every day through trying to decipher the chaos that resulted from the explosion of online predators and identity thieves theft and hacking has brought about during the past couple years. 

With the newest annihilation of any remaining privacy recently accomplished by Cambridge Analytica through Facebook( and likely all social media platforms) we might as well accept that Malicious actors have taken our personal information and turn it right back at us to the point where not just our financial identity, but our political preferences, our dogmatic beliefs, our general concerns for our health or our preferences for where we by shoes or clothing are all out there for whoever they feel like selling it to in order to make them impossible to avoid. 

Being unwilling to give up that easily, I am pondering our need to move in a new direction to solve this issue. Perhaps register as everyone and have so much contradictory data out in the world that even I couldn’t find me. I discussed it with some cyber experts and at first; I looked at working to confuse the “bots” used out there whose very specific function is determining my personal information and preferences regarding every aspect of my life from my favorite aspirin or antihistamine to my visits to Zappos or Zulily.  One idea that came over the transom was to register for as many paradoxical sites as I humanly could (political, social, religious, etc.) to take steps to confuse the bots that are trying to determine who I am for their owner/client and what I necessarily believe, want, prefer. Some savvy friends and IT experts quickly noted however, that no matter how thorough or diligent I am in that process; those bots are exponentially faster than I am. So even if I took the time to go and view and click; the bots would know which I was doing more frequently and longer; so attempting to outwit them that way is futile. Their bots are always going to be faster than I am. So; Dag Nabit, I need a bot who works for me. 

If every consumer had a bot working on their behalf; then privacy might be able to elbow its way back onto the playing field.  I would not be combatting the cyber-hackers; several thousand of me would. All of them using bits and code to complicate data engines. This could be enough to bring back my privacy.

Generations X, Y and Z are already more ahead on this curve than prior generations and there are a growing number of Information Technology consultants and firms beginning to develop scripts and tools that can recalibrate for other bots; which they are starting to share with consumers. Perhaps, if we all work together to technologically combat this cyber war in a way that the bots will understand, we can take the profitability of selling our alleged identity on the dark web.  While that seems to Utopian concept, it could work to bring us back to where we want to market ourselves or our services to one another, we need to do some of the outreach ourselves. Until then, “у моего бота называть ваш бот” (Have my bot call your bot).