Online Privacy
“A 20-year-old woman stalked through the Internet and killed. Thousands of e-commerce customers watching as their credit card numbers are sold online for $1 apiece. Internet chat rooms where identities are bought, sold and traded like options on the Chicago Board of Trade. These are the horror stories dredged up by privacy advocates who say the Net’s threat to personal privacy can’t be dismissed as mere paranoia. And, they say, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.” So says Bob Sullivan writing for MSNBC1
The internet began so sweetly, so innocently. Sending an “e-mail” to a friend or colleague half a world away. Trading recipes in amongst the corporate communications, or buried in the DNA sequencing paperwork. So tame.
Even when the internet first began, without pictures, all was text and still the world was sublime and childlike. Then came HTM, in caps as it was born shouting, not only in text, but also in pictures.
Then the marketing types discovered it and they wanted to know how many times the site was “hit”. “If we can show the prospective advertiser we have more people walking into his virtual store that come into his brick and mortar, we will be on the gravy train ride” was the thought in Marketerville.
At first everyone was so enamored of this new baby, even with the load voice, that they blindly followed wherever the data stream led.
Then came the boy who told us “The Emperor has no clothes.” Only instead of the Emperor being naked, it was us, the users, being striped of our clothing, one piece at a time. That boy was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Showing us how our once perceived privacy was now in the hands of marketing people all over the world and that our every move could be, I say “Could be” tracked. Did we worry? Not really. As long as we stayed away from the porn sites, we were safe. Au contraire.
Today, according to EFF, “New technologies are radically advancing our freedoms but they are also enabling unparalleled invasions of privacy.”2
Cell phones are electronic bracelets of sorts allowing our locations to be tracked with ease.
Web searches about sensitive medical information might seem secret, but any company wielding a subpoena can have your data. Kiss your medical coverage good bye.
And, thanks to the accuracy of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies, boarding a plane could cause you to be turned away or worse, arrested simply based on erroneous data.
“But in my own castle and off the net, I’m safe, right?” Not necessarily so. Cable television has come to quite a little tattle-tale. What you watch as well as when you watch it can now be more accurately monitored by that little box than with the Nielsen ratings.
Still not convinced? Toddle over to https://ssd.eff.org/ and check out the “Surveillance Self Defense kit. It’s an eye opener.
Bibliography
2. https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy
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