Of all the effects of high-speed global data networks, none seems quite as insidious as the noose they draw around traditional American notions of personal privacy. Just ask the members of the WELL, a small but cutting-edge online service based in Sausalito, Calif. Last week they were alarmed to learn that Kevin Mitnick, a notorious hacker in North Carolina, allegedly had not only broken into the service’s computers and begun reading their electronic mail but also used the WELL as a screen behind which he was able to launch anonymous attacks on networks throughout the Internet. Before being arrested, he even taunted WELL administrators by stashing stolen computer files on one of their servers, in a directory entitled “Computers, Freedom and Privacy.”
It was a bracing reminder of the fragility of privacy on what is fast becoming known as the “information snooper-highway.” “With the new online services, we’re all excited that this is going to be our window on the world, to movies, consumer services, for talking with our friends,” says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The reality is that this may be a window looking in.”
Concern about computers and privacy dates back to the 1960s, when governments first began to store their files on the roomfilling machines then in use. As computerized record-keeping spread to the private sector, the machines became repositories for the most intimate details of people’s lives. Anyone who opened a bank account was leaving electronic traces of his or her house payments, buying habits, visits to the doctor. Telephone service created trails leading to families and friends. Even a social-security number was a potential liability: with it, a dedicated sleuth could pry the holder’s tax returns loose from government computers.
Since then, invading privacy has become steadily easier, almost as a corollary of Moore’s Law, a Silicon Valley maxim that computer power doubles every two years. More and more personal data take digital form. Driver’s-license numbers provide electronic links to the licensee’s physical characteristics and driving record. Credit cards and automated-teller-machine cards make financial records even more accessible. At the same time, computers themselves operate at speeds that were unthinkable a few years ago: personal computers running Intel’s Pentium chip are more than 300 times faster than machines with the same company’s first-generation PC chip, the 8086. Today, anyone with $3,000 can buy essentially the same search-and-retrieve facility as in all but the most advanced government and business systems.
As a result, surveillance is now a brokerage business. Where once this was the domain of experts in such arts as wiretapping, the barriers to entry have been lowered. Consider Sandy Martin, a private investigator in Wilmette, Ill., who was asked last year to track down an elderly man based on nothing but his name. The client was the man’s daughter, a New Jersey woman anxious to know if the father she had never met was a carrier of a blood disorder. Mar-tin collated nine database searches, all of them legal, to locate a man in Florida with the right name and the right approximate age, 84. A phone call confirmed that he was the woman’s father. The entire search took four days from a desktop computer and cost the client $1,500. Martin says the pre-PC way would have consumed two months and more than $10,000.
As computer power increases, so does the information available. Commercial online services routinely ask members to submit personal profiles along with their credit-card numbers. These might include not only names and addresses but hobbies–items that could be used to create mailing lists of great value to advertisers and marketers. The services typically check members’ computer hard drives every time they log on; the purpose is to determine any need for software updates, but the scan can also surreptitiously record valuable information about the way members have configured their machines and what software they use. Until customer protests forced it to back down, a Beaverton, Ore.-based company called Central Point Software did just that, as part of registering its PC Tools for Windows.
Every online keystroke leaves its fingerprint on the service’s central computers. Over time, system operators could build detailed profiles of members based on their electronic mail, the Internet newsgroups they subscribe to, the kinds of software they download. Such profiles could then be sold to telemarketers or others using online services to send demographically targeted commercial messages. These records are vulnerable to penetration from outside, too. Last month, 28 Harvard students were mortified to learn that the campus newspaper, the Crimson, had identified them as consumers of pornography simply by tracking their Internet activities through the university’s network.
In the end, we compromise ourselves. We leave traces of our lives in databases everywhere. Computers are built to recognize patterns, to find coherence in individually insignificant details. If we then lose our privacy it’s because we volunteered.
85% are concerned about pornography being too available to young people through the Internet.
80% are concerned about being harassed by “virtual stalking” through unwanted messages on the Internet
76% are concerned about being harassed by real stalking from someone they first meet on the Internet.
