Don’t expect privacy on the Internet
It can’t be said too often; there is no privacy on the Internet. Anything you put up on the Web might as well be on a public bulletin board- a permanent and searchable bulletin board. And that includes email and social site posts.
In a post about online privacy, security expert Bruce Schneier writes:
If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private. Certainly, only you have access to your e-mail. Well, you and your ISP. And the sender’s ISP. And any backbone provider who happens to route that mail from the sender to you. And, if you read your personal mail from work, your company. And, if they have taps at the correct points, the NSA and any other sufficiently well-funded government intelligence organization — domestic and international.
And there is a lot of information about us personally that is being generated and stored:
And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers. Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation — or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.
Schneier says there need to be some legal restraints on data collecting and reading:
This isn’t a technological problem; it’s a legal problem. The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don’t have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant — even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target’s home or office — the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.
At PCMag, John Dvorak writes about data mining on the Internet:
As you read this column, someone somewhere is probably lurking in your life, plowing through everything you do online to try to learn more about you. And while there are plenty of reasons why a person might want to do this, here’s the most likely one: He or she is finding a way to rob you blind by selling you lots of stuff you probably don’t need. Why do you acquiesce? Because this person knows your hot buttons well.
Deep information about individuals has always been the holy grail of marketers. If I know everything about your tastes, likes and dislikes, attitudes, and even casual thoughts, I’ll bet I can find something you want to buy, and persuade you to buy it from me.
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