mctaylor: Privacy

Privacy

This is my personal site, it is not intended for commercial use.

I am faced with the difficult decision of how much of my life to disclose to the big bad world.

On the Internet it is hard to remove details about yourself. It is hard to make others forget your past. Mistakes happen, people change, but published material, even personally published stuff like a small personal web site, tends to end up being archived or preserved. Possibly for longer than the creator wants it to be.

I remember being shocked when Dejanews.com (later Deja.com, recently acquired by Google (groups.google.com) opened up. They had several years of old Usenet postings, including my own from when I had first got on the Internet and including hundreds of messages I had posted on a variety of topics in several newsgroups, which until then I had considered "transient" discussion forums where messages expired from the servers and disappeared. This was my wake up that online privacy can be important.

Until then I had not considered the future, I treated my messages as self-deleteing within a week or so, as they did from my local newserver, and didn't think anyone was secretly (Dejanews didn't tell anyone about it before hand nor asked me for my permission) archiving what I thought was a digital conversation, where after a while memories of those discussion would faded. The "bit rot" I expected wasn't happening, electronic memories were not fading instead my words were being backed up onto tape, and my copyrighted messages were sold(?) in bulk to Dejanews.com without my permission.

Cheap digital storage meant that all those conversations were recorded.

Later on, I followed comp.risks, also known as the RISKS digest depending on how you read it, via Usenet or via a mailing list. Unsurprisingly it discussed risks relating to technology. One topic that caught my interest was "identity theft". This was the first place I had heard of such an activity, and it was actually going on in the real world, not some television cop drama.

The growing number of computerized databases has increased dramatically in the last ten to twenty years, and due to the unexpected explosion in cheap remote access, typically via the Internet, meant that an ever growing number of people and companies had access to these recent databases. Previously databases were expensive, not shared, and only accessible at a single location.

These now widely available or widely inter-linked databases often lacked security and consideration in regards to misuse of this information.

The movie Roots, which caused a new hobby, creating thousands of amateur genealogists, destroyed the classic security question used by banks, "What is your mother's maiden name?" Making it less than worthless, because some people blindly believed it provided adquate protection even though it had not been particularly good ever to stop identity thieves who knew their victims. Now with thanks for hobbyists it was even easier to steal the identity of a random stranger.

The "direct marketing" (junk mail) industry grew, now with larger and cheaper databases that contained more details, and with more cross referencing. Then they expanded into telemarketing when long distance telephone companies deregulated and long distance prices fell. Companies could set up one call centre and telemarket for an extended period of the day at cheap rates across the nation.

Never underestimate the resources of net.kook or the other side in a flame war. You never know to what length a technically minded angry or unhealthy individual may go to, to make your life unpleasant.

So that explains some of my obliqueness. I am concerned how my life is projected into this cynical and harsh world. I grew up in a part of the world where my physical surroundings afforded me a lot of privacy. Now I live in a not so private, not so quiet, small city and in more densely populated country. I notice the lack of space which is one of the most expensive, but quite effective privacy measures.

Geographic space does not protect from those who could be called the digital equivalent of "Peeping Toms", companies like DoubleClick and law enforcement agencies that want warrentless access to digital information.

The electronic networking has reduced their costs of information gathering and storage, and technologies such as the web browser "cookies" have made their data more accurate thereby increasing the demand for this "marketing" data. If information has value, why am I not being paid for these disclosures of book buying or software preferences? The information comes from me, it is about me, it reflects on my likeness, and is the product of my existent. Current laws which give a celebrity rights to control his/her likeness when used by another company. I think I should be entitled to the same control over my digital likeness which appears to also have monetary value.