How To Protect Yourself And Your Online World

I’m a traveling girl.  I love nothing more than a nice long stretch of road and a good playlist, a plane ticket and an unknown destination, an expanse of time and nothing to fill it with but the exploration of a new city, country, or state.  I travel enough to have an entire section of Petit Elefant devoted to the subject, and I actively work on checking off my travel life list (see also: surfing in Hawaii and Costa Rica and going to a soccer game in Barcelona).
Travel is my lifeblood.

Over the last few years I’ve started traveling differently, using a site called Airbnb.  Have you ever heard of it?  Airbnb is a way for people to rent out their homes to random people like me while they’re out of town, or during the summer when they travel.  It’s usually far cheaper than a hotel and a more “local” way to experience a new city, and I’ve completely fallen in love with this new order of travel.  I’ve met some really lovely people this way, and have stayed in really unbelievable apartments and homes and cabins in cities across the world; Paris, Barcelona, San Francisco, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  It makes the world smaller and the internet even cooler than it already is (how is that even possible?).

Here’s a peek at a cabin in the woods my family and I stayed in when we traveled to Fort Bragg, California last year for a swim meet.  It was magical and cozy and warm and perfect.

This particular rental had chickens who provided us with fresh eggs, a garden with produce for the taking, an acoustic guitar out for my daughter to play, and a wood burning fireplace, all tucked back into the forest, just a half a mile from the ocean in Northern California in a town called Fort Bragg.  I’ve always wanted to go to Fort Bragg, because there’s a beach there called Sea Glass Beach, where instead of sand, the beach is all sea glass.  And since I’m obsessed with collecting sea glass, visiting this glorious beach has been in the back of my mind as a must-visit destination for awhile.  So we went as a family, and it was glorious, the cabin was perfect, and when we finally got to the ocean, I laid down on the beach made of sea glass and did snow angels.  It was one of the happiest days of my life, no lie.

Which means for approximately the next ten billion years I’m on an email mailing list for the Polish WWII history museum, and the Real Barcelona soccer team, and Amtrak / Delta Airlines / some random pub in Paris.  All manner of people and institutions have access to my REAL contact info to do with what they please.

But there’s an app for that.

It’s called Sudo, and it launched last week to help me (and you, and everyone else) with this particular conundrum, (and a million other little online safety conundrums) of living in and traveling in this awesome online world.

Here’s how it works:

You create a profile in Sudo, (like pseudonym, get it?  clever.)  and get a phone number with your real area code, and an email address.  All of it routes back to your real life phone and email inbox, but whomever you’re interacting with online doesn’t get at your actual info.

And the real gravy train?  You can create as many ‘Sudo’s’ as you want.  So.  Let’s say you like selling stuff on Craigslist.  You can have your own Sudo just for that.  Shop on Amazon a lot?  Ditto.  Travel to Barcelona and Paris and Mexico and don’t want to share your real cell phone with the taxi company that picks you up at the airport?

SUDO.

All of a sudden you become the boss of your online world.  Sudo makes it possible for you to surf the web without internet trackers, and since each Sudo gives you a private browser, you can buy that embarrassing hippie deodorant off Amazon without it showing up as a suggested buy every time you login.

*AHEM*