# Episode 3: Personal Identity & Data

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-04-22
- **Format:** Video · 55 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Analytics
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/episode-3-personal-identity--data
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTsRdr0P4Ks

In episode three of the What So What Now What podcast, Ravi and I dig into personal identity and data. We catch up first on the Opta Pro Forum, my Tableau Train the Trainer week and the Nintendo Switch, then unpack what companies collect about you, how much you can actually find out, and whether any of it should bother you.

## Key takeaways

- Data collection sits on a spectrum: there is a healthy trade-off when a service like Google Photos genuinely enhances your life, but Facebook running background facial recognition without explicit consent crosses an ethical line.
- Marketeers have moved beyond cookies to fingerprinting, identifying you from your browser configuration, screen size, fonts and recent sites; tools like Ghostery reveal dozens of trackers running on a single page.
- Free public Wi-Fi is rarely free: hotspots harvest device IP and MAC addresses to geolocate and track you, so a VPN is worth using whenever you connect to one.
- Credit reference agencies and products like Experian's Mosaic profile you in granular detail, and combined with enough data points anything can be de-anonymised, like assembling a puzzle from a few corner pieces.
- Try downloading and visualising your own data, from bank statements to running routes, to understand the story it tells; Strava's heat map famously exposed secret military bases this way.

## Chapters

- 1:02 Catching up and the Opta Pro Forum
- 3:47 Train the Trainer and the Nintendo Switch
- 7:19 Introducing personal identity and data
- 10:41 Privacy as a trade-off and Google Photos
- 19:17 Facebook crossing the line
- 26:09 Advertising and ad blockers
- 28:58 Fingerprinting and trackers
- 32:19 The microphone myth and passive tracking
- 33:51 Credit agencies and de-anonymisation
- 37:06 GDPR and regulation
- 40:04 Lifetime customer value
- 43:00 Downloading your own data

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/episode-3-personal-identity--data

---
just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena