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Posted on 03/17/2010 6:20:18 AM PDT by neverdem
If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?
Probably not.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”
In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.
So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.
But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue.
Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy...
--snip--
“social signature,” researchers say...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
fyi
I’d be nervous about using Facebook and the like. I noticed my niece has quite a bit of information out there on the Net. If some nut case stalker decided to look her up, I doubt he’d have much of a problem. I don’t think people realize that remaining anonymous in this unhinged society provides some margin of safety.
I can predict with 100 percent accuracy profiles that belong to gay males.
1. Sex: “Male”
2. Status: “Single” or “In a relationship”
3. Interested in: “Men”
Can I get my grant money now?
I am sure that I have never, ever, ever entered my SS number into any blank on the internet.
I also never give my real birthday, or even close to the correct year.
If you want privacy transferring computer data, run your own lines.
There is no such things as a “right to privacy”. There is no such thing as a right to “health care” either.
Though the SCt manufactured a ‘right to privacy,’ I would agree with you. In reality, it is evidence of the mind set that the state grants rights, instead of the state enforcing rights granted by God.
One is a negative right, the other is a positive one. Google the difference between the two types of rights.
As for privacy, it is not explicitly codified in the U.S. Constitution itself but would fall under the all-purpose Tenth Amendment and could be inferred from the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Wouldn’t the libertarian view be to keep the government out of this process?
Someone asked me the same on another thread a few weeks ago.
Optimally, yes. But I still ping on threads like these because a lot of people on the FR libertarian list like to be kept abreast of privacy issues in general...especially when it comes to potential breaches by private entities.
It’s still a violation if it’s done unannounced. Even with laws upon laws to supposedly protect us from this, it still happens. You can’t really depend on the gov’t to protect you from anything, and stuff like this is usually just an excuse to enhance regulatory powers.
But the problem does afford the opportunity to make people more aware of these issues, and understand what private AND gov’t entities can do to collect your info online, despite any onslaught of new regulations the FTC chooses to enact to protect you, or in the case of gov’t snooping on you - the Constitution.
Shouldn’t the laws be removed? Shouldn’t the information be free to post or collect, purely up to what everyone wants to do?
Yes, I would rather the government stay out of it altogether, because any regulations could be abused to inhibit the normal functions of online business.
At the same time, the technology can be abused covertly without the user’s knowledge, to collect information that could be used to harm the unsuspecting.
It’s a tough issue, for sure.
I’ll just add - you can pass all the laws you want against this, but it won’t keep the malicious online from doing it! Same as any other law.
Burglary being illegal sure makes it easier to manage than if it were legal.
True. In this case, I’d think you’d have to show some malicious misuse of the collected info before calling it a ‘crime’...and stealing someone’s identity is already a crime under other criminal codes.
Most occurences of snagging info online now are just nuisances, resulting in things like spam, junk mail, etc.
I’m definitely not advocating we criminalize a nuisance. There are already laws on the books to make the misuse a crime.
Letting someone build up the entire portfolio, including all information and DNA (from an envelope for example) and a total profile of not only you but all the children in America merely because they want to, is a little more cavalier and trusting than I care to be.
It’s becoming hard to expect any real degree of privacy online. I do favor laws that prohibit the actual snooping of a PC’s disks and memory (ie: spyware) for any kind of information, and then shipping it off to Korea, or Russia. I would love to see anti-spyware laws with teeth. But how do you enforce that internationally? Which is where most of this crap comes from.
What the FTC seems more concerned about here, are things like Facebook and other networking sites, where your personal info can be stolen...basically because most people volunteer it. All it takes is a little common sense and personal responsibility to ensure that doesn’t happen.
A net surfer has got to be aware and smart about what they do online. If you frequent sites like Facebook, Myspace, etc. and you post your phone number, physical address, or any other info that could be used to paint a picture of your identity (as the article suggests) then that essentially becomes public knowledge. There’s nothing to stop people from getting on Facebook with bad intentions and snagging your info.
I’m on Facebook, and I see people doing it often. As a user, you can restrict what data the general public can see. But, there’s also a lot of users Facebook who set up ‘groups’ that offer free stuff. They spam people with invites to join their group, and I see friends falling for it all the time. Once you join their group - POOF - they have access to all your info, and you basically gave it right to them. Unless you’re using super strict privacy settings (most users don’t - by default) they can see everything you post, any personal data on you, etc. Anything you volunteered to your friends, is now theirs.
Legislating against that kind of stupidity is damn near impossible. But I wouldn’t put it past this Marxist federal government to try. And you probably wouldn’t care for the result either, is my guess.
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