A LIE is a false statement made by one person to another, who is entitled to hear and know the truth, and which false statement tends toward injury to the other.

I want to start with a short story about a time I was asked to give far too much personal information.

During the years of COVID mass hysteria, people were compulsively testing to see if they were sick. I went and got a PCR test once and I was taken aback at how much information they wanted from me. If the point of these tests was for the individual to know if they were sick so they could self-quarantine, why did they want an entire profile on me? Name, date of birth, phone number, address... why? Setting aside the other concerns around the fact that this was a third party conducting these tests under state contract (and they now have a database of personal details for millions of people), why was this information required?

Seeing as Australia was recently building quarantine camps for the infected around this time, it was a concerning amount of information they were asking for. If one Western government would place its own people in mandatory confinement, why wouldn't mine? (Most people forget that the US placed Japanese people in camps during WWII). The last thing I wanted to have happen was to test positive for the "scary" COVID virus and have a group of people show up at my house asking questions.

The requested information was irrelevant to them and inconsequential in the matter of me being infected or not.

I lied about it all (and did not have COVID).

Which leads me to the entire point of this post. Generally speaking, most people you encounter in everyday life are not entitled to know real information about you. It simply isn't important for them to know it. The name you give at Starbucks is irrelevant and giving a false name to get your drink is inconsequential. Using a nonsense or alternative phone number at the store to get loyalty rewards can actually benefit you, spam calls are annoying. But most importantly in the example I've given above, what your home address is when trying to determine if you are sick or not is beyond irrelevant. Aside from fears of being swept away to a camp (which hopefully never happens in the US again), your home address is probably the most sensitive piece of PII talked about in this post. It is, quite literally, where you lay your head at night and a major target when you are away. You keep irreplaceable personal items, tax documents, valuables, firearms, gold, money, and anything else that popped into your head just now at the house located at your address. No way I'm just going to hand that over to a private third party just because they asked.

So why do most people feel compelled to hand out their full names, dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers when asked? I think most people would agree that identity theft is a huge problem and with companies getting hacked literally every single day, why would you hand out your PII like you hand out candy on Halloween night? Get a burner email address, get a Google voice phone number or other prepaid burner phone, use a fake name and birthday, and look into getting an alternate mail box.

I challenge you to rethink what information you volunteer next time you're asked for it. Judge the requested information based on relevance to the context of what you're doing, and the consequence of giving false informaiton in that context. Start small, next time you're asked for a name on your food order, give a fake name. Use a burner email address when signing up for things. Look at getting an alternate phone number that can receive calls and SMS and use it for anything non-personal. I've been using a Google voice number as an alternative for nearly a decade now and its worked great. I'm happy to say that the vast majority of spam calls I get come to that number and not my primary phone number.

An alternate address is something I've been looking into and I believe a good option for me would be a Commercial Mail-Receiving Agency (CMRA). This is something I'm not too acquainted with yet, but it is covered well in the book "How to Be Invisible" by J.J Luna (I highly recommend reading chapters 1-5 to get a taste). The idea being that, you obtain an alternate address you can have mail sent to without having to give your main home address. The chapters in the book that discuss this topic might seem extreme to the average person, but personal security and OpSec are all about risk mitigation, so read up and pull out the nuggets of information that make sense for you.

I'll leave this post here with the intention of revisiting it in the future.