How To Protect Your Privacy Online 
How To Protect Your Privacy Online
How to (try to) keep your personal information offline
How rich are your new neighbors? Who just called your phone? Want to pretend you're somebody else? There's an Internet technology out there to collect the information you need. And even if you're not interested, an identity thief, marketing company, government snoop or nosy neighbor can surf the Web and probably find out about you.
Scary, isn't it?
Privacy experts say the phenomenon has more and more people wondering how to keep their personal information offline.
"Trying to safeguard personal privacy in the modern era is one of the biggest challenges that there is," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Take Chris Hobbs, a 27-year-old information technology manager in Fremont, Calif., for example. He actively tries to keep his personal information offline. He has no blog, no MySpace or Facebook page, and he attempts to make purchases and downloads from Web sites that don't require an e-mail address, name or phone number. If he has to give out personal details, he makes them up.
When a new service called MyPrivacy from ReputationDefender that promises to find and then erase most of your personal data from the Internet launched earlier this month, Hobbs signed up. "I really wanted to find out what kinds of records are out there," he says.
The service found more than 100 records of Hobbs' name and other personal data available on the Web. He says that "probably half" of the records really pertained to him.
MyPrivacy immediately filled out and submitted the forms that various data brokers require for removal of his information. As the brokers process the requests, Hobbs' information should disappear. While MyPrivacy cannot guarantee 100 percent success, Michael Fertik, the chief executive officer, says the goal is to make it harder for identity thieves, marketers and snoops to find people.
Fertik says more than 200 places exist on the Web where anyone can go and try to retrieve someone's personal information. Many of the sites allow you to remove or correct your personal information, but doing so is a hassle and new information flows into the databases fairly frequently, meaning you have to go through the whole process again and again.
"There's a little bit of a whack-a-mole game you've got to play," he says.
A $4.95 monthly fee entitles MyPrivacy to play the game for you.
Evolving Technologies and Privacy Erosion
There's no question the evolution of Internet technologies, particularly in the realm of search, has made it easier to find publicly available personal information, says Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google.
"The [publicly available] information about ourselves in the past might have been a needle in the haystack," he says. "These amazing search-engine technologies make it easy to find the needle."
Take, for example, the evolution of phone-book and mapping technology. In 2003 – ancient history in Internet terms – Google introduced a feature that links phone numbers, addresses and maps. Type your landline number into the search bar and chances are the top result is your name and address with a link to a map showing where you live.
Similar features are available today on most major search engines. The search companies compile the information from publicly accessible sources such as online telephone directories. They just make the information easier to find. Most search engines allow users to remove their number, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN included. The search engines emphasize, however, that removal from their sites does not mean removal from public records.
And now it's not just landline numbers available on the Web. This July, online information broker Intelius added a comprehensive list of supposedly private cell-phone numbers. The company gets the information from marketing companies and public records, Ed Petersen, executive vice president of Intelius, said in an e-mail.
Did you put your cell-phone number on a sweepstakes entry form? Oops. Your information may have been sold to a third-party marketer who sold it to Intelius. The data broker does allow users to temporarily opt out of the service, Petersen says.
Then there's the explosion of personal data freely shared among friends on social networking sites. This summer, the Web was rife with news stories about members of the Facebook Generation who learned their public Web profiles had cost them a new job. Savvy hiring managers routinely check out applicants online and make job-critical character judgments based on the information they find.
Even happily employed social networkers may be surprised when they type their name into a personal search engine such as Wink and find it has pulled their hometown, age, occupation and other personal information they made publicly available in their online profile. On Sept. 5, Facebook announced its database of users would soon be available to the major search engines. Users can opt out via privacy settings.
"Services are beginning to aggregate public data and collect it in one spot or simply collect it in a very powerful form," says Rebecca Jeschke of the San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
A good example, she says, is the "Street View" function on Google's popular mapping technology. It provides real street-level imagery of major cities such as San Francisco and New York. The technology helps users better visualize their destinations, but the images of real people going about their daily business in public spaces raise a new set of questions.
"You want people to be able to document public lives, whether in pictures or in words; that's an important freedom that we have. But the difference starts to get into what is legal and what is ethical, what is legal and what is polite," Jeschke says.
"Google's Street View is really interesting, and I've used it to help find restaurants and stuff, but they didn't need to include people's faces to make the service useful."
Google's Fleischer says face-blurring technology is not precise enough to reliably blur everyone captured in the images. Doing so, he adds, would compromise "the richness of the urban environment" the Street View service provides. Nevertheless, Google has implemented a policy under which anybody can contact the company via a Web form to request that their picture or that of their child be removed.
Privacy Protection
Some steps users can take to protect their privacy include being aware of and vigilant about the information they give online, such as name, address, phone numbers and Social Security number.
EFF's Jeschke suggests users consider a pseudonym when signing up for a social network or elect to keep their profile private. Bloggers can opt to open their pages only to friends and family via password protection.
"However, if you choose to make those things public because you want everybody to see it, you have to realize that everybody will see it," she says.
Hobbs, the MyPrivacy user, already takes aggressive steps to protect his personal information, but found they haven't stopped its spread.
"You don't really know where your information is or who has it or who's doing what with it," he says. "I don't get a lot of telemarketing calls or anything like that, so I don't really know why it's there, but it is."
back to WWW & Internet return to NOCS homepage
» Send to a friend |