Incognito in a digital era? This is what Going Drak means, running on-line dark digital realm while others are in the blind of your presence. Although it is surely and most likely an impossible task to completely accomplish, except for those that do not use a computer or smart phone, if you are reading this it is not you.

My aim here is to admittingly, discuss in-brief my naive understanding of what can be done through social media using a few web applications or apps simply on a tablet or device.  As a result of my now enlightenment, I have decided to go dark as much as I can when I am out and about, traveling to and fro, from work or at Disnyland.  At home, it’s rather impossible unless I decide to become some kind of hack, dark web and all, torrents-bit coin, which I am not.  It’s just that I would rather not have someone merely apply a program and sit next to me and read my tweets as I tweet, knowing full well who I am without me knowing that they are doing that. It’s weird.

Yes, I know, you read my tweets now, what’s the difference?  The difference is that I run anonymously as DK most of the time, except at home.  I work as my vanilla-mostly boy-modish self, using my God-given birth name – I don’t want to be outed by someone who desries too by malicious or ill intent.  Delilah Knotty simply is dormant during regular work hours, no tweeting ever that’s been moto since the beginning, although what if the Twitter or goodness Tumblr application was still “open” on my tablet, that is if I was loged in? It’s a bonanza.

Let’s get to a scenario, I do love scenarios: what if you were on-line as Mistress X and your day job is trading, or a super-slave boy, who is a Administrator at a hospital, and then a co-worker turns on an app and scans an area, say the cafeteria or food quad, and see discover you, slave-boy and Mistress X on-line, tweeting away…lalaaaa.  Or not even that, just having it open, your are still discoverable.

Your photo is on Twitter perhaps, maybe it’s Facebook, they scan your media to identify you in the crowd, after a few moments they hone in on you, ah yes.  In fact the more they more they migrate through the crowd, the better they can hone into proximity, it’s your GPS – it’s also enabled. And then, they recognize you. OMG they say, she is a dominatrix, and he’s a sissy slave boy? Wait to the word gets out.

In fact, dear friends, the lesson I learned recently from a quick and dirt social media forensics course are the following:

• Turn off GPS on you device.  This does the following: geolocates yourself in real-time and geotag so your media with metadata (GPS coordinates).
• Possibly lock your account temporarily.  This increases your privacy so you can’t be so readily profiled and pretty much shuts of the GPS feature.
• Wipe your photos and videos metadata.  If you are using say, older media taken on a GPS enabled device, the GPS data is stored on it. 

Reasons:

• Media, that is geotagged, can be read easily with an application, it’s called EXIF. The coordinates can be easily retireved and if you tweet’n from your dungeon, home, etc. it pins you to your location. Crazy-stupid.
• Smart phones and tables with running social media and GPS enabled, an application can easily see who is on Twitter or whatever, and they can see names and handles. If they like you in some eery way, they take your handle and using another web-application download all your history. And store for personal reasons at their leisure.