I’m looking at the last of my dark roast. The steam is long gone and the scone I’d been nibbling looks like chipmunks with some kind of hyperactive disorder got to it. I opened LinkedIn to find a friend up north and changed course like I was chasing williwaws across the bay in my sailboat. I changed my current employer to “A really nice company,” and let me tell you why.
First thing I noticed was that “Confidential” had started to become an identity. LinkedIn wanted to hook me up with everybody else who worked at “Confidential.” What a fail. Back in 2014 somebody wrote that you were conceited if you didn’t post your company name. I figure he was in sales. He said change your name to anonymous if you wanted to flame him. Okay, I get it. Rage bait.
Here’s the thing that guy missed. LinkedIn harvests you, Palantir works the government loophole, and Flock builds the panopticon. Three different animals, all feeding on the same thing. I’ve been a CISO and privacy officer and know better than spamming the world. So why do I keep my company off the socials, generally and specifically?
I started when I left academia. In academia it’s all about your association to your employer. And by the way, I’d really like a university affiliation as a research professor somewhere, so caustic with a cause, if anybody’s interested. When I went to DoD as a CISO I was slow to update, beating my departure by only a few months. I didn’t update my job when I went into the IC until I started doing outreach, and then I had the counterintelligence folks vet everything I put on LinkedIn or what I call the long dry spell. They vetted a lot of the people who tried to link up with me too. Yes, there were bad guys. And yes, I’m absolutely sure there are bad guys in my connections today.
I never trust that “you share four zillion connections with this person” as a limiter. I remember Robin Sage.
If you don’t know the story, Robin Sage was a fake persona a security researcher built around 2010. Attractive young woman, cyber threat analyst, fabricated jobs at places like the Naval Network Warfare Command. She didn’t exist. Over a few months she racked up hundreds of connections across the military, intelligence, and defense contracting worlds, and people handed her real information. Dinner invitations. Documents. Comments on a paper that hadn’t been published yet.
The whole point was that credentials on a screen aren’t credentials. A convincing profile and a few shared connections is all it takes for smart, careful people to lower their guard. So no, four zillion mutual connections doesn’t reassure me. It’s the exact thing that made Robin Sage work. I can’t filter everything, though I’ll be honest, I do filter anybody who looks like a salesperson.
But why keep my current job off the socials? One little “I’ve been bit and it hurts” reason is I’m pragmatic as a mountain lion watching an antelope. No matter how hungry I am, nothing happens until I commit. So, yay me, I got a job. Doesn’t mean I’ll be here next week. Too many jobs look from the outside like bait and switch on requirements and comp. A few employers have sent me branding decks and slides on post-employment social media engagement, and I rarely play along. I wait until a press release, or some other outing by the company that means it isn’t a secret anymore. So far, my current company hasn’t said a word about me being their first CISO.
The other reason is that I’m certain the sharks are already circling. The minute I say I’m a new CISO, the salespeople rush my door while I’m still sleeping off the welcome-to-the-team celebration.
So to be different, and to stop having my corporate identity be “Confidential,” I changed my company to “A really nice company.” That should stop a few PII trolling tools in their tracks. I can imagine AI agents furiously looking up stock tickers and running business searches, and you know somebody has that registered as a real LLC somewhere. But mostly I imagine people going, “Awww. Shoot.”
Then, in a fit of all that is holy, great, and good, I went back and stripped out all the stuff describing what I’d done at each company. Listen. If you want to know how I do a job, don’t look at the past. Even though I’m an ancient old guy with a beard, I’m constantly adapting and finding new wind for my sails. The more you put out there, the more you restrict your future.
Here’s the great part. It’s an amazing filter for the BS too. Since I did this I’ve seen a sharp drop in “you’d be great for our junior intern-track help desk opening.” Thanks but my savings pay more than an internship. I’m weird. I like being a CISO, and I look for new verticals to do the work in. I’m in a new one right now and I love it. A few people know where I landed. For the rest of you, all you need to know is that it’s “A really nice company.”
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