*That's been quite close to my experience. Not so much "zero history" as .5 history, then .4, .3…
*I keep wondering when the system will be refined and tightened enough to throttle and confine us global wanderers, but then I realize that this attack would alienate the suits up in business class. So maybe it just won't happen in my lifetime – or at least, only to particular hapless classes of migrants, the ones who are least likable, or the ones who are in, and also presenting, the most physical danger.
https://medium.com/@changeist/on-being-a-data-puppet-560e095373d5#.gx3x1y4ls
"About six months ago, I started disappearing. My visibility in the US, which had been my main residence for the previous 11 years, began to fade.
"This wasn’t in response to some scandal, or witness protection, but the response to a steady shift in the work I do from from West to East, from North America to Europe. I moved my business and family to Amsterdam, leaving behind over a decade of consumer existence — a critical decade as it turns out, from a data collection perspective.
"As the move slowly ramped up, and even before it formally started, my purchasing cycles slowed down and spaced further and further apart. I was on the road frequently, much to the confusion and apparent incomprehension of my bank’s fraud department, which had seemingly slept through globalization. I appeared less and less as a persona within the databases of companies, and left less of a footprint in my home. I left Amazon, Whole Foods, Best Buy, and the small city worth of low-cost electronics retailers and vendors of cheeses and sneakers which relied on me for their existence. I surfed less on my home and mobile networks, I watched less TV, I bought less. I, or my data, gradually faded.
"In those 11 years, I left a real and substantial trail of actions, intentions, interests, curiosities, purchasing patterns, favored sizes, perennial topics and product categories. From the point of view of retail, financial services, logistics companies, I’ve been a cloud of often fuzzy — but related — datapoints. While my job as a futures researcher frequently involves searching for and spending time consuming—things, information and —with often only the slightest, most exotic connections to them all. In the day-to-day though, I still ate tacos and burgers, drank a limited range of beers, frequented only a half-dozen key stores and ordered online from a small coterie of companies, like Amazon, Apple, REI, and a handful of others. Somewhere in there was, or should have been, a somewhat legible consumer.
"But with the move, I left a ghost behind, a nearly empty shell, with hibernating credit cards, bank accounts, CCTV cameras, search logs, behavioral profiles and who knows what other unknown trackers, sniffers, and profiles idling deep on surreptitious servers run by agencies and programs only spoken of in leaks (yes, most of these databases are joined up and global, but who knows where the seams are?). Somewhere, my data doppleganger still exists like an old suit hanging in a closet. Maybe it’s out there somewhere shopping without me…."
