Imagine for a moment, you were caught up in one of the 7,098 data breaches reported in 2019 (the highest number on record) or one of the breaches yet to be discovered. Let’s say it’s a shopping site. Perhaps you don’t have to imagine. Perhaps you lived it.
If you’re like most of the 4.5 billion internet users, you’ll have used your legal identity and other private data—name, shipping and billing addresses, phone number, email address, credit card—to create your account on the breached site. Your personal information would now be exposed and compromised—a criminal would have this private data, and with it they could commit any number of crimes like credit card fraud and identity theft.
If, instead, you used a Sudo digital identity from the MySudo app, which you’d created exclusively for your online purchases (you might have labelled it ‘Shopping Sudo’), only the information attached to ‘Shopping Sudo’ would be compromised. And if you’d set up ‘Shopping Sudo’ with some different identity attributes from your legal identity, then there is no way the criminals who got hold of your ‘Shopping Sudo’ could compromise your other Sudos (say, ‘Bank Sudo’ or ‘Travel Sudo’) or link ‘Shopping Sudo’ to your legal identity. Once you heard about the data breach, you’d have simply deleted ‘Shopping Sudo’ from the app*, created a new one, and gone back to shopping safely and privately online within minutes.
That’s the power of MySudo. And that’s why MySudo is the simplest and best way to compartmentalize your private data.
You’re probably aware compartmentalization means categorizing and separating your private data to reduce the impact when it is compromised. It’s the world’s most powerful data privacy strategy.
MySudo was created on the exact same principle.
MySudo is based around the Sudo, a customizable digital identity that intentionally differentiates from your legal identity and mitigates the risk to your highly sensitive private data.
You can create up to nine different Sudos and use them in any context (e.g. for banking, selling on classifieds, catching up with friends, and booking travel). Check out the following link to learn about some of the ways you can use Sudos.
Each Sudo has its own set of attributes and associated capabilities:
- name
- phone number
- address
- email address
- virtual cards for secure shopping
- browser profile (all your bookmarks and any cookies that sites set are compartmentalized to the browsing Sudo)
- notification settings for phone, email and message
- contacts and more…
See the full range of features (and more are coming soon).
You give each of your Sudos one or more identity attributes that are different from your legal identity. You can make your Sudo identity a little different (e.g. by having a different phone number) or very different (e.g. by having a different name, email address, phone number, virtual cards, contacts, etc.). You label each Sudo, and you can even assign a different notification sound to each, to alert you to the context of the incoming contact (you’ll know whether your kid’s soccer coach or your bank is calling or messaging, for instance).
You structure your Sudos to achieve the degrees of privacy, safety, organization and convenience you need. For example, you might regard your medical information as more sensitive than your financial information, and your financial information as more sensitive than who you know. You decide what suits you (and at the end of this article you can see how two of the world’s leading privacy experts use their Sudos).
Sometimes, you might want one of your Sudos to retain some of the benefits of ‘privacy invasive’ searching and tracking online. Health information is a great example. When researching a health condition, you may want some level of tracking in order to preserve your search history, mark favorites, set bookmarks, be offered search results relevant to your previous searching, receive discount coupons for remedies, be offered new research material, or even be referred to doctors or hospitals specializing in your condition. By using a Sudo, you can still have all these benefits, but they’re not correlated to your legal identity.
You can use your Sudos online and off (you could give a Sudo number and email address to your realtor, for example, and different ones to your latest blind date). Sudos are a useful life tool for managing your privacy and safety, and for helping you to easily recover from a breach if one does occur. Like we said, MySudo offers compartmentalization at its simplest and best.
Listen to how two of the world’s leading privacy experts Michael Bazzell and Justin Carroll structure their Sudos in this episode of The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show: Our Sudo Strategies.
* Deleting a phone number or its Sudo does not refund your entitlement for that phone number.For example, SudoMax plan provides nine phone numbers total lifetime in the account, as opposed to always allowing up to nine phone numbers concurrently. Once used, the only way to get another phone number is to purchase a line reset.
