Is Nothing Sacred?
What’s your privacy worth to you?
Let’s start further back: does your personal information have a value? Sure it does, or you wouldn’t protect it. You wouldn’t want another unauthorized person to have copies of your social security number, your drivers license, your home address.
How about your sex life?
How do you feel about people knowing everything about it? Some people, like me, really don’t care. But others are a trifle uncomfortable with it.
Here’s the thing: while everyone seems to get upset about the government keeping tabs on us in any way (which I don’t get too upset about – nothing to hide really), we don’t seem to be paying much attention to how fellow net-users might be able to abuse our privacy.
Last week, an unpleasant little fellow named Jason Fortuny decided that he’d have a little fun on Craig’s List by posing as a woman seeking sex from men. I won’t go more into detail because it gets pretty explicit.
After getting close to two hundred replies within 24 hours, he posted each and every one, with all personal details including addresses and phone numbers and email addresses, and with the explicit pictures some men sent, on another site and advertised his remarkable feat.
Now, I really don’t care what these men wanted or thought they’d get out of their shallow relationships. I also don’t want to know who they were, what they did, or what their anatomy looked like. I worry about the fact that a lot of people loved getting this information.
I also worry that there doesn’t seem to be a law against this, certainly not a clear one.
Which brings me to a topic I’ve obsessed about for the last ten years: who owns your information?
Credit card companies can easily pass your information to Equifax and other companies that subsequently sell your information to companies interested in your credit rating.
Criss-cross directories and the Yellow Pages, hundreds of information-providing companies, your own bank and grocery store, may be in the business of selling your information to others.
In some cases, outright criminals do whatever they can to get your information.
Is it right that your personal data should be bringing others money and/or amusement?
Who really owns your data? And should you know whenever anyone receives it, and for what purpose it’s being used? Is it an invasion of your privacy if someone sells pictures of you on the beach, or your old drivers license picture? We’re clear on public record data being accessible to all, but what about data you give with a reasonable expectation of exclusivity? Who owns that data?
I think we own our own information. And I also think anyone using it, selling it, or giving it away should be required by law to at least notify us.
This, much more than the government’s dabbling with Big Brotherism, worries me. I don’t trust the government totally. I trust corporations a whole lot less. And I really don’t trust malicious liars.
For now, our best bet: hold our personal information close. Once it’s out there, you can’t reel it back in.
Yes, everyone is always afraid of an Orwellian type scenario with a Big Brother govt. But the real danger lies with these well-funded marketing research companies, which actually analyze you and your habits through a variety of methods (incl. microscopic, hidden cameras on products), to gain more profits for their clients. A good example of this would be if you sign up for one of these supposedly innocuous supermarket membership cards to gain future discounts, airmiles et al, through point accumulation- you are, in reality, potentially signing your right to privacy away, without realizing it. So we need the govt. to protect us from such exploitation through legislation.
Mosey said this on September 24, 2006 12:21 pm
Ahem—one of my previous jobs in my previous life, before pirating, was actually working in a grocery store corporate office taking care of those membership cards, sending people’s lost stuff back by using the card, etc. The department head was a stickler about never ever ever abusing this information.
But I know exactly how much can be looked up about a person through their customer card. It’s an appallingly large amount. Besides which, we had an awful lot of outside folks—police, skip tracers, what have you—who called asking for information. Once we even had an estranged boyfriend. And more than once we were called upon to help identify a dead body whose only ID was the grocery card on his keychain.
DreadPirateYarr said this on September 24, 2006 1:40 pm