Sarasota PC Monitor
Practicing the Black Art (9/05)
Privacy and Anonymity On The Web
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable ( U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commision, 1977). This was written long before the internet as we know it, existed.
It's important to understand the difference between privacy and anonymity to avoid confusing the issue. In a free society, privacy must be allowed for individuals because with privacy comes accountability. Only criminals or those with criminal intent seek to be anonymous so they can escape accountability to society and their victims.
Examine those who engage in spamming, phishing, pharming, and identity theft, and you will find they go to great lengths to assure their anonymity. Why does any criminal wish to remain anonymous? If law enforcement authorities do not know who they are, they can not be prosecuted for their crimes. This is the basic problem with anonymity; there is no accountability.
In contrast, those who seek privacy have no issues with accountability. Law abiding citizens have no problem being held accountable for their actions because they are indeed law abiding. Privacy doesn't mean you pass through life as a cipher, completely unknown to others. It means that your fellow citizens and every level of government respect who and what you are.
Technology tends to be impersonal. Google's Adsense program doesn't know or care anything about you at a personal level. It cares about what part of the world you live in and the kind of advertising that will appeal to you. We may not like it, but there is no evil intent. When Google made the program available, they did point out that if you want free email you must accept being exposed to advertising. The worst you can say about it is that it is crass and materialistic, but do we not live in a crass and materialistic culture?
Part of our collective attitude toward privacy derives from the way the concept of privacy has evolved in our social order. Until very recently in human history, privacy as we know it simply did not exist. Most people lived in small communities and everyone knew everyone else's business. Someone can still know a lot about you by using the internet as a surrogate for talking with the neighbors. For example, I live in Sarasota, Florida, and if anyone wants to know what I paid for my house, how many square feet of living space it has, the date I bought it, and many other details, all anyone has to do is log on to the Sarasota Property Appraiser web site. Anyone can find out similar information about your house too. If this outrages you, there's not much you can do about it. The property Appraiser is required to post this information according to Florida law. This information has always been a part of the public record, and available to anyone who wanted to take the time and trouble to obtain it.
Before the internet however, you had to go to the Sarasota court house and physically retrieve the paper records to find details about a home purchase. Today, you can log on to the internet anywhere in the world, any time of the day or night, and get that same information with a few mouse clicks.
All kinds of personal information about you can be found through various public records with information that YOU have freely given for one reason or another, never suspecting that this information would appear on the internet for worldwide access. This enormous gathering of personal data is not confined to the internet. Every electronic and credit transaction adds more detail to a picture of our activities and habits. Modern cell phones have GPS capability. Everyday activities are monitored by surveillance cameras. Many of us buy merchandise with coupons we clip out of newspapers, magazines, flyers or print from a company's web site. How many of us pause to think of the trade-offs that are inherent between privacy and convenience? How much really is that "free" offer worth if it means information about you is analyzed, traded or sold to a third party?
Raging against Zabasearch, Google, and other internet entities does little good, as they are merely reporting what they find. They don't steal or create data. They only search public data bases. I'm not trying to create a storming controversy, only clarify what it is we are protesting. I believe it is the possible misuse of information which many of us consider personal and nobody else's business.
During the early stages of the internet, those who used it tended to know each other personally or by reputation. Many of them resembled the kind of idealist who never imagined that their handiwork would become global in its effects. You couldn't be anonymous because there were too few people on the system and everyone knew the technical tricks. The internet started out like a friendly neighborhood where no one locked their doors and turned into a worldwide sewer where everyone you meet must be looked on with suspicion.
As the internet grew in population and complexity, it eventually caught the attention of clever thieves who figured out how to illicitly profit from the internet's weaknesses. Unfortunately, it is relatively easy to "spoof" or forge an internet return address, making it virtually impossible to trace an e-mail's origin if the sender wishes to remain anonymous. This is primarily how thieves, swindlers, virus makers, spammers, and others with evil intent can carry out their malevolent deeds without regard to consequences.
The problem of spamming by fax machine was solved by making it too expensive. Congressional legislation made it illegal to send faxes without the prior consent of the recipient. There was no way a fax spammer could simply move offshore and continue business as usual without enormous cost. Spammers remain undeterred because they can simply move their operations beyond U. S. borders. A partial solution may lie in forcing bulk e-mailers to pay for the bandwidth they consume. If nothing else, it would make spammers subject to theft of service charges.
There are those who say what's needed is an entirely new software and hardware architecture. Microsoft appears to be working on this, but their efforts may be limited to the business community. That will be an improvement, but it's not enough.
Another avenue is the implementation of a system of national routers serving as control points for data originating outside the U. S. The routers could act as a first line of defense, authenticating and securing "foreign" data. The downside to this would be political ramifications which are difficult to predict.
It's unrealistic to expect the internet to return to the way it used to be. It will never again have that small town atmosphere or be a playground for academics, scientists, and engineers. It's matured into a method of communication, social contact, and many other things good and bad. It has come to resemble the world around it. This makes it more important than ever that those who really care about the internet, and all the good it has done and can do in the future find innovative and superior ways to protect it. :
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Copyright 2005. This article is from the September 2005 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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