If you cherish privacy, forget the Internet. Computers and people now can track virtually every move you make.
Privacy is vanishing offline, as well. Electronic eyes are everywhere--banks, restaurants, schools, airports, and tollways. Each day, you leave wide trails on computers, video cameras, point-of-sale systems, and other information-gathering devices.
"For all practical purposes, privacy has become less a right than a skill," warn Charles Jennings and Lori Fena in their book, "The Hundredth Window" (Free Press, $26, hardback).
Their title is drawn from a basic security concept: If you lock 99 entrances to your property and privacy, but leave one tiny opening unguarded, you will be vulnerable through that "hundredth window."
Many people are looking for your hundredth window--or already peeping through it. "List marketers, credit profilers, information brokers, and other legal vendors make a business out of collecting and trading electronic data profiles of you," the authors point out. So do thieves who steal Social Security numbers, credit-card information, and other personal data.
Despite their book's promising subtitle--"Protecting Your Privacy and Security in the Age of the Internet"--the authors actually demonstrate how privacy and security can be very difficult to achieve and maintain, especially by individual computer users.
The Net, they point out, is alive with "networked technologies [that] are enabling a whole host of new threats to our personal privacy, security and peace of mind; and not only are governments ill-prepared to thwart these Internet-age abrasions of privacy, but frequently they themselves are major offenders."
They also caution that "there is so much information collection going on in our lives that we have become quite accustomed--even numb--to it all."
And it will only get worse. As XML becomes more prevalent on the Net, it will enhance data exchanges "and could lead to a quantum leap in the ability of machines to read and compile data, without any direct human intervention," they predict.
The writers are cofounders of TRUSTe, a nonprofit watchdog group that promotes privacy policies for Internet sites that collect personal data.
In their view, continued tensions between those who push Internet advances and those who protect personal information "might someday produce a dynamic equilibrium" that will let us keep some personal information to ourselves. They also present a "modest proposal" to create a more trustworthy Internet. Their idea: "We who are being tracked…must start using the Net to learn as much about the data snatchers as they know about us."
But do we realistically have the time, energy, and resources to battle the growing armies of data grabbers?
As a cautionary tale about new privacy threats, this is an eye-opening and valuable book. It is also a well-written and practical guide to keeping a tighter rein on personal data.
For most of us, however, the horse of privacy got out of the barn long ago. Now it's galloping around the world. We'd like to know more about how to bring it back.
Si Dunn and Connie Dunn
