&quot;Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives&quot;<p>Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate.<p>Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value.<p>The &#x27;info&#x27; exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products.<p>Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers.<p>This is not saying everything&#x27;s fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person.<p>I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn&#x27;t accurately portray a person digitally.