Vanish

I highly suggest reading this article in Wired Magazine:


Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here's What Happened.

To summarize the story, for all those that wish to forgo 20 minutes of technology filled-manhunt-awesomeness, a writer by the name of Evan Ratliff challenged readers of Wired Magazine to find him within one month. The winner was to win $5,000.00. Ratliff told no one where he was going, gave himself a new identity, fake credit card, fake business cards, sold his car, and completely reinvented his life. Yet unlike the typical hide out in the woods story - Ratliff chose to live a new life as a new person. That which made this story most interesting, is that he continued to use technology we use everyday - ie Facebook and Twitter.

The story takes you on his very well planned escape - involving the use of double-masked IP addresses and lots of untraceable gift cards,and some very well placed misdirection.

The story itself is quite interesting, yet the resounding difficulty in becoming lost in our technology-filled world remains. Given a few faults of Ratliff, and a quite large group of online contributors he was eventually found.

It's somewhat frightening though. How easy it was for people to dig up information about Ratliff. In a matter of days they knew everything from his food allergies and soccer interests, to recent credit card purchases and license plate numbers. In such an information driven world it is becoming so hard to disassociate yourself from exactly that - your information.

Its ironic really. Upon the Internet's introduction and growth, we've been reminded of it's anonymity, yet is anything that private anymore?

Ratliff explored an interesting side-effect of our technology driven lifestyles. And though I'm not in any rush to absolutely disappear, its a bit disconcerting knowing just how difficult it really would be.