Sandra Matz

So, but it was just one conversation after the other that was all about me crashing the bike.

Certainly. I mean, I think that maybe not the bike surveillance. I think this one was a hard one. But generally speaking, the fact that my neighbors knew everything about my business also meant that there was a community that I felt safe in. So it was a community of people who knew me, who tried to help when I was looking for advice. And I've never quite experienced anything like it ever since.

I think so. I mean, some of them were just trying to interfere with my life, but some of the advice I got was incredibly helpful. So one of the ones that I still remember is that when I was finishing high school, I was thinking about doing a gap year. It sounded like a dream to me. I was like, well, you can travel the world, you can take a year off, don't rush into university.

But I remember being quite torn because not many of my friends were considering it. And I was, very ambitious, I would say at the time. So I was like, well, maybe it's just a waste of my time to spend a year traveling. I could start university, get a job. And luckily, a lot of my neighbors told me like, look, you seem like someone who's been always craving to leave this village to see some

some of the world. Why don't you do it? Like you can work for many, many years after you should really consider it. They helped me even find a job to scrape together the money. So I think that was one of the times that I felt very much supported.

In some ways, I would say so. Because I think it was a slightly less biased and maybe self-critical version of myself.

Yeah, it's a funny story because I remember entering the apartment and you know, you meet someone for the first time, you have no idea who they are. And I entered the apartment and it's pristine. It's first of all, it has this huge library, which I loved and had books in Hebrew and English and French. So I was like, oh man, this is a bookworm. I love it already.

Walked to the kitchen, it's sparkling clean, which I cannot say of my own kitchen. So I was highly impressed in the sense that everything had its place. The knives were perfectly organized. I got some glasses for us and they were perfect. No marks, no watermarks anywhere.

And I just kind of started building this image of like who the person living in this apartment, the guy I was dating at the time, who he was. And it just felt like he was this curious, book-loving person with almost like an OCD sense of order.

It does feel like Sherlock Holmes. And I think we do this all the time, right? We meet someone new. We look for clues of who that person is. Could be their apartment. Could be what they're wearing. Could be what they're saying. It's really we're kind of trying to piece the puzzle pieces together in a way.

Well, it worked out really nicely. He's now my husband and we have a 10-month-old.

Very accurate. So I think he I would say he's probably the most curious person I know. He loves podcasts, loves reading, loves to learn everything about the world. And he also I have to say is a little bit OCD in a good way.

Yeah, so this is actually work that inspired all of my research in the digital space. So Sam Gosling was one of the first people to try and figure out how good are strangers at judging our personality if they just take a look at our bedrooms and our offices. And he distinguished between these two types of cues that you can find.

So he said, well, some of the cues that you find in someone's office or bedroom

are the intentional identity claims that we that we put there right so we put up a poster um of lady gaga because that's the signal that we want to send to the world of well we're into music and this is the type of music that we like and but then there's also all of these other cues that we don't really think about right so the socks are disorganized the bed isn't made um it's the opposite of my husband it's just like probably a little bit more disorganized so what sam gosling really showed is that if you combine all of these things

you get a pretty good sense of who the person living in these places is.

Yeah, so in a way, right, so I could take a look at your office or your bedroom, or I could see what my neighbors are doing. But on some level, I think we all now live in this, what I think of as a digital village. And so we all leave these traces, these digital traces all the time. That could be anything from, The stuff that you post on social media.

So again, relatively explicit identity claims to the data that is captured by your smartphone. So GPS records, where do you go? Your credit card, what do you buy? And the same way that we could put the pieces together from someone's bedroom, we can also do that in someone's digital space.

Yeah, it's actually one of my favorite studies that was coming out of MIT. And what they showed is that it's very easy to identify someone based on your spending records or your GPS records. So you can imagine, as you said, there's millions of people in New York.

And even if we, say, got access to all of their credit card spending, anonymized it so we don't have names, we don't have any personal identifiers, it's very easy to reverse engineer the data. You can imagine that, let's say, you