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It’s really hard to be James Bond these days. Apart from health & safety restrictions on the use of poison umbrellas and the legal restrictions of the murder of foreign-looking goons, and all the paperwork around the expenses, you’ll be rumbled in an instant by your Facebook account. Because you don’t have one.

It is not simply a question of keeping details offline, either, but the opposite: individuals or identities without deep, broad online presences are precisely those likely to raise suspicion. “The challenge of having a credible digital footprint is significant,” Mr Inkster said. Fake Twitter or Facebook accounts alone do not make the grade.

From The spy who liked me: Britain’s changing secret service - FT.com

If I come across someone in a work context, and they are not on LinkedIn, then I assume that they are either in the witness protection programme or have been in prison. And of course if you are not yourself on Facebook, then it’s only a matter of time before some schmuk snaps you and you’re in the system. You could be out and about with an important business contact having a very important business discussion about important business issues, for example, but because of the camera angle and the perspective a snapshot of this event might be entirely misconstrued.

And once you’re in the system, you are no longer anonymous whatever you might think about being off the grid.

Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they're the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot.

[From Why Facebook is beating the FBI at facial recognition | The Verge]

The old spies had to stake you out and track you down and stalk you and then murder you in a dastardly fashion. Now they just run the face recognition software until you pop up somewhere and then… it’s radioactive sushi time. Until my plan for Facebook-blue burkhas for all is accepted by the mainstream I’m afraid I can no way rounds. By the way, I noticed in the newspapers that while it may be increasingly difficult for spies to convince people that they are not spies, it is apparently much easier for people to people other people that they are spies.

Mark Acklom convinced her he was a spy and defrauded her of £850,000 

From Gloucestershire woman fell for 'charismatic' fraudster who claimed he worked for MI6 | Daily Mail Online

I don’t want to pick on this poor woman, and I know only too well how easily women can fall under the spell of handsome and charismatic Englishmen, but had she never heard of LinkedIn? If a match.com counterparty was trying to convince me that they are from MI6, I would fully expect to open up their LinkedIn profile and see a convincing employment narrative going back many years. And if they didn’t have a Facebook profile, then I’d naturally assume them to be a fraudster. 

Spies are an interesting use case when you start to think about the series business of population-sale identity they present a problem. If the purpose of a national identity system is to uniquely identity someone, then you don’t want it to ping back “James Bond” when 007 has to use the biometric identification system at the casino entrance.

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