Most people, over the course of a connected life, create more accounts than they remember. Some are professional, some personal, some financial, some practical. They are created, in many cases, with the deliberate intention of keeping the categories of one's life from running into one another.

The accounts nonetheless connect through the small details they share. A common email address used for verification on two of them. A phone number registered against three. A recovery address that ties four to a single point. A device fingerprint that the service quietly recorded against all of them. A birthday volunteered to most. These were the fields the principal completed without much thought; they are the fields a modern aggregator uses to join them.

The connecting is rarely visible from the principal's side. The accounts continue to function separately; the categories of life continue to feel separate. The aggregation is done by parties whose work is to combine records, and whose customers are interested in the joined picture rather than the components.

The picture that results is sometimes useful: it allows a single password reset, a single statement of accounts, a single record of correspondence. It is also sometimes precisely what the principal preferred to avoid: a tying of professional standing to personal preference, of financial position to ordinary habit.

The deliberate auditing of these cross-references is, on a careful timeline, one of the more useful exercises available. It usually reveals more than the principal expected. It rarely involves closing accounts; it more often involves changing what they share, so that the categories of life return to being categories rather than a single record under a single name.