Eye on the Web: Steering Clear of Prying Eyes
Let me tell you a little story. About a year ago, I got an e-mail from an acquaintance. It was one of those bulk check-out-this-Web-site messages. The site this person urged me to visit, the message claimed, was an example of just how little privacy I had in this day of rampant big brother technology: It could take a picture of me right through my computer screen! When I tried to visit the site, it was down, and I did something I’d never done before and will never do again: I replied to the bulk message, expressing my not-so-positive sentiments about the message and its contents.
I’d like to think it was all those offers of free Nikes or checks from Microsoft for trying out their software that finally drove me to act in such an irrational manner. This paranoia about online privacy has got to stop, I told my acquaintance and everyone else who’d received his e-mail. The technology does not exist to photograph you through your monitor. It’s madness. And of course, it was madness, in the form of a joke site that showed the face of a monkey staring back at you through your monitor. I was abashed and my acquaintance was very hurt that I’d so grossly underestimated his Internet savvy.
Your Data Are Showing
There really is a great deal of paranoia out there, and people really are beginning to feel that control of their most private information is being wrested from them, either forcibly or through their own inadvertent actions. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get your data. In truth, insidious marketeers (or racketeering marketers) are taking full advantage of today’s technology to gather as much information about consumers as possible, all with the aim of making you that offer you can’t refuse.
And it’s not just a few sleazy spammers who are out to collect on your personal data. In the world of brick and mortar, Levi Strauss’ new San Francisco flagship store trades hopped-up entertainment for your fingerprints and measurements. Mattel, the maker of every young girl’s favorite busty doll, sells kids’ software that can secretly connect your computer to the Internet and send information about the files on your hard drive to the company’s Web site, though the company has reportedly ceased using the capability. Ad banner companies such as DoubleClick can put together a profile of your shopping and browsing habits by compiling information about where you go on the Web. And in most states it’s actually legal for employers to read your e-mail, monitor your Web surfing habits, and even listen to your phone calls (and, according to the American Management Association, more than three quarters of the largest US employers regularly do).
Action Items
What’s a Web surfer to do? Well, to begin with, you can keep up on the state of privacy on the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation will provide you with the latest in privacy news and has put together a handy list of twelve things you can do for free to protect yourself on the Web. These include smart tips like making sure you have a secure connection to sites that want your personal information (make sure the Web address starts with “https://” instead of “https://”) and checking to see that sites participate in privacy seal programs like those offered by TRUSTe and the Better Business Bureau Online, as well as less practical things like having your browser alert you before accepting cookies. (Have you ever tried to enter a site that deposits multiple cookies with this option turned on? You’re better off disabling cookies, though then you’ll have to enable them with sites that won’t work properly otherwise.)
There are a number of other sites that offer similar information, and every one of them is worth checking out. They include Junkbusters, the Online Privacy Alliance, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International (especially useful if you visit sites not based in the US), and the US Federal Trade Commission’s Privacy page. One site — Privacy.net — will even scare the pants off you by displaying all the information it can glean from your computer — such as your IP address, operating system, ISP, browser, plug-ins, even your screen resolution. It’s sobering.
Taking Control
If what really peeves you isn’t that information about you is being shared but that you have no control over the process — and that you don’t profit from the transaction — then check out one of the numerous companies calling themselves infomediaries. These companies will help you sell your personal information to marketers. Lumeria creates a SuperProfile for you, doling it out for cash to the companies you OK. Persona will do much the same thing. Both companies have funded privacy coalitions, which can be found at www.privacyplace.com and www.myprivacy.org, respectively.
Or perhaps you simply don’t want to share personal information and are willing to go to some trouble and perhaps expense to avoid doing so. Numerous utilities, such as The Limit Software’s $15 Cookie Crusher 2.5d, can help turn a war against cookies into more of a pleasant pastime. Another forthcoming solution — Guidescope, which is now in beta testing — blocks both banner ads and cookies, and the software is free to home users. You may also have seen ads for Zero Knowledge Systems, which sells software called Freedom that lets you set up pseudonyms for your various online comings and goings. The ads poignantly feature a little girl with a bar code emblazoned on her forehead. Ironically, in the days before online privacy was an issue, I once saw someone walking down a San Francisco street with a bar code tattooed on his neck.
Privacy Rules
We may not need any of these defenses in the future, however. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect this year, prohibits companies from collecting information from children under 13 years of age without the written consent of their parents. And the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in June unveiled its long-awaited Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P).
P3P will let Web surfers like you and me set our own personal privacy preferences. The legal mumbo jumbo that most sites’ privacy statements are written in will be translated into computerese, and your browser will be able to alert you when you are entering a site that doesn’t meet your privacy requirements. The problem, as privacy advocates see it, is that P3P is still an optional service — no one’s saying sites have to provide privacy information this way.
Who Cares
Still, you may ask what the big deal is about online privacy after all. So businesses want to market stuff to you that you may actually want. It’s better than getting all that random spam in your e-mail box, isn’t it? Before I began researching this column, I might have agreed. I always say the Web is an anarchy, after all. But I don’t want to live in a world where anybody and their cousin can gain easy access to my bust measurements and brand of coffee. It’s not just big, well-established corporations that have access to technology; anybody with a little ingenuity and money to burn can reach into your world and pull out a fistful of personal data. And now that our worlds are increasingly being lived online, it just makes sense to have the same barriers to exploitation there that we do in our offline lives.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on August 7, 2000
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