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Big Brother is Watching!

Everybody is Watching You!

by Mike Banks Valentine

Did you know that you are willingly providing information to the world with every site you visit, every product you buy. Your mailing address, your phone number, your sexual preferences (based on sites you may have visited), your resume' are available, literally to the entire world?

Personal privacy on the web is non-existent and detailed information on you and your family, your income, your tax information, employment history, legal documents and e-mail, are becoming easily accessible to anyone who wants them. Good guy, bad guy or even your own dear mother.

It's all becoming more available to the world with each site you visit, each product you purchase and each e-mail you send. That's right, your e-mail is not private, and can be accessed by any bright kid with a modem and too much spare time on his hands.

It's widely known that e-mail is being used as evidence in court cases to convict hackers, software moguls and corporate executives of various wrongdoings. You're an innocent? You erased it? Doesn't matter, the receiver and those that were sent a copy of your message may have an edited, incriminating, misleading, archived copy.

There are answers out there to keep your e-mail more secure, like the encryption key based "envelope" provided by services like

http://www.privacyX.com

to protect your identity and stop others from tracking and reading those notes you send that you believe are private.

Then there are the sites like Lexis-Nexis "People Locator"

http://www.lexis-nexis.com/lncc/general/privacy_info2.html

At this site they provide "subscribers" of their service with "publicly available" information as well as "some nonpublicly available" information. Fortunately there is a way to "opt-out" of their database, by sending your name, address and phone number mailto:

removal@prod.lexis-nexis.com

Whew! Now you're outta there! But wait! At Lexis-Nexis there's a reference to the "IRSG" or Individual Reference Services Group, which is a business consortium that make a living off of selling your information to anyone willing to pay for it. In their own words, the group is made up of "commercial services that provide data to help identify, verify, or locate individuals".

Now you have to go to each of the members of the IRSG and check each member privacy policy (links kindly provided)

http://www.irsg.org/html/irsg_members.htm

 by the members. (Although the privacy policy links for two of these IRSG members return a "404 not found" error. Hmmmm. And when I visited the "TransUnion" privacy policy page I got a "HTTP/1.1 Application Restarting" message repeatedly.

Some provide opt-out options, others don't, but you can approach each of the credit reporting agencies, locator services and other information verification companies through the contact information they provide and give them a piece of your mind if you like.

Don't expect to get far with services like CDB InfoTech (recently become ChoicePoint) as when you reach their privacy policy page link you'll find that they . . . "do not allow individuals to "opt-out" of our databases." because CDB "only serves legitimate businesses and
government agencies that have an appropriate need for the information we report." Hmmmm. I guess it's up to them what's legitimate and who's appropriate.

Now all of the foregoing was interesting, but there is one particular issue that relates specifically to the web and your surfing, buying and e-mailing habits. You should know by now that every site you visit can place a "cookie" on your hardrive which will record a few crumbs of information about you.

This is harmless enough at first glance when all they seem to care about is the time, date, length of stay and pages you visited at their site. But when you know that advertisers that serve ads from the sites you visit can also track your visit, link it to other stored data about you gathered at other sites and finally to any other information they have stored about you, how do you feel?

This means that the harmless little "session number" or "state data" gathered about you from every site you've ever visited, every product you've ever purchased online and every banner you've ever clicked on is stored in the database of the ad server and distributed to it's clients!

It is possible to set your browser to the "Do Not Accept Any Cookies" option. I recommend you try it once, if only for the enlightenment about how many sources are collecting information about you. Some web pages will send as many as a dozen requests for cookies and many web sites tell you flatly that in order to use their online service "cookies must be enabled on your browser" to use the site.

It gets tiring and frustrating clicking the "OK" button in the warning box that appears each time your browser detects a request to set a cookie on your hard drive, if you've checked the "notify me" option in preferences. If you want to know who's collected information about you online, I've discovered a neat little free download that will keep you informed. Cookie Viewer software:

http://www.winmag.com/library/1998/0901/how0063.htm

If you want to get a clearer picture of how cookies can be used to invade your privacy, I recommend an amazing demonstration of how you can be followed around the web without your knowledge. Privacy.net has set up a demo at:

http://www.privacy.net/track/

You'll see how providing information in bits and pieces to multiple web sites creates a cumulative database on your travels, habits and preferences online. Prepare to be mildly miffed or fully outraged, depending on your level of concern with invasion of privacy.

The final frontier (one becoming legislated by the FTC) is that of information gathered by web sites in order to provide "services" to you online such as chat, email, directories, instant messaging and other membership type services. It has become routine for each of these
online service providers to ask detailed information about you when you register with them.

The Federal Trade Commission ( http://www.ftc.gov ) has already established the "Children's Online Privacy Protection Act" or COPPA to require those businesses that collect information from children under 13 to make that information restricted to third parties such as advertisers. The FTC also requires businesses to obtain "verifiable parental consent" in order to collect any information from kids and provide parents access to and allow them to edit or delete any information there.

To find out more about the FTC requirements, visit:

http://www.coppa.org

 and review the news and compliance issues facing online businesses that collect information from children.

To see a possible solution to this problem for the small business
owner online, visit:

http://WHAMworks.com

They offer a nifty software package called WHAM! for Web Hosted
Account Manager that can keep your business out of hot water at FTC.

It all adds up to one very daunting task if you seek anonymity online, although one web site also provides "safe surfing" by offering a service by which your information is disguised through a proxy server:

http://www.anonymizer.com/3.0/index.shtml

What it all comes down to is this, you must be fully informed about what information is gathered about you, how it will be used and to whom it is made available. Practice Safe Surfing!