There was a time when the surest sign of wealth was visibility. The large house on the hill, the name above the door of the new hospital wing, the photograph in the society pages. Today, among the people who could afford all of those things, the fashion runs the other way. The truly powerful are increasingly difficult to locate online. Their addresses are unlisted, their photographs scarce, their digital traces pruned with the care of a topiary garden.
A small and discreet industry has grown up to serve them. In Geneva, a firm called Oubli offers what its founder, Raphaëlle Sorensen, describes as a data concierge. For an annual retainer, her team scours the internet for traces of a client's life, from property records to old school photographs, and works methodically to have them removed, corrected or buried. The service is expensive, painstaking and, according to Sorensen, fully booked until next year.
Alongside the concierges come the objects. There are encrypted phones with no camera and no app store, sold in plain boxes through private dealers. There are laptops with physical switches that disconnect the microphone, and home routers that pass every request through a chain of anonymous servers. Some are beautifully made, finished in brushed metal and leather, and their marketing borrows unmistakably from the language of fine watches and tailoring.
The price of disappearing
It is easy to be cynical about all this, and I confess I began that way. But the longer I spent with people who buy these services, the more I understood the anxiety beneath the purchase. Most were not hiding anything sinister. They were simply exhausted by the sense of being watched, measured and sold, and they had the means to do something about it. What troubled me was not their choice, but how few others can make it.
Everyone deserves a door they can close. At the moment, only some people can afford the lock. — Raphaëlle Sorensen
Privacy, after all, was not always a luxury. For most of human history it was a default, guaranteed by distance, anonymity and the simple difficulty of keeping records. The digital economy reversed that arrangement, making exposure the default and discretion a service to be purchased. The rich did not invent this situation. But they are the first to have escaped it, and their escape tells us something uncomfortable about how our shared infrastructure was designed.
Sorensen, to her credit, seems aware of the irony. Oubli publishes free guides explaining how anyone can request the removal of personal data from brokers and search engines, and the firm donates a portion of its fees to legal clinics that help victims of online harassment. She argues that the real solution is political rather than commercial. Stronger laws, she says, would put her out of business, and she would be delighted.
In the meantime, the new status symbol endures. It cannot be photographed, since that would rather defeat the purpose, and it makes no sound. It is simply an absence where a presence used to be, a search that returns nothing. After months of reporting, I was strangely envious of it. Then I looked up my own name, saw how much of me was there, and began, one tedious form at a time, to take it back.
