Declining Privacy

Privacy - Part Of Our Past?

The decline of privacy is not new but it is increasing. Back when all data was kept on IBM punch cards or in file folders, private information had little chance of being made public simply because of its inaccessibility. As companies moved to computers, crude as they were 30 to 40 years ago, databases began to appear with all kinds of customer and client information that could be accessed by simply typing in a few search terms.

Computers have improved, databases are more easily accessed and personal, private information much easier to find by anyone with proper clearance. Private information was still fairly difficult to get unless you worked for the government or law enforcement or knew someone who did.

A lot of personal information you have no control over. Some company or a government agency has collected this information and then through carelessness or ignorance makes that information available to the Internal even though it was to be available only on a special intranet or to people with a special authorizing code.

Declining privacy is often our own fault. We get a phone call from a credit card company, offering a new, improved card. We start giving the person on the phone information we would not divulge to a stranger on the street. To protect ourselves we must learn to tell that caller to send us a application and if we are interested, we will call or send in the required information. Why do we so easily trust someone that may only have discovered our phone number?

With the coming of Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and other Internet search engines, private information may not be remain as private as we would like. These search engine are doing what most of us want: providing relevant information on any subject we desire. Because of the curiosity of these search engine bots and spiders, personal and private data is finding it way to the Internet where it doesn’t belong.

Declining privacy is not just the fault of overzealous search engine bots and spiders. Some webmasters are careless in what information they post and how that information is protected. To assume that a robots.txt file will protect personal and sensitive information is one of the first mistakes. While it is true that the major search engines will obey and exclude any files or directories specified in the robots.txt file, not all bots and spiders obey this file. There is no law or punishment if a search engine fails to obey a robots.txt file so we can only trust search engine to do what they say they will do.

There are bots and spiders programmed by hackers that use the robots.txt file to search for excluded files and directories. Failure to use password protection for these directories is the first mistake. Using simple passwords to protect these sensitive directories, is the second mistake.

Having your name and address available to everyone doesn’t seem so bad. However, add a map that show exactly where you live can give stalkers and thieves a better advantage. Now, add detailed maps of military bases, power plants, and other sensitive sites and the potential for abuse grows exponentially. While most of use will use this type information benignly, some will use such maps for illegal and perhaps terrorist activities.

Privacy is not just about individual information but it is about any information that could be used to aid and improve illegal plans, whether those plans are for robbing a bank or a store or for blowing up a power plant or for infiltrating a military base.

The real question is how to match the public’s demand for information with the demands for individual and governmental privacy. Is there a way to protect information from being improperly used? No, the only way is to limit what information is made available to the public and to ensure that sensitive information is protected by passwords, firewalls and proper authorization codes. The most secure method is to place private information on a computer system that is not connected to an intranet or to the Internet but how practical is that?

The right of the public to know must be offset by the danger that information could pose to the country and to the individual if improperly used.

Search engines must be monitored and controlled in what information they freely display. Search engine bots and spiders are not intelligent enough to determine if information should be crawled and I know of no way that information could be vetted before it is displayed in a timely manner. Therefore, there must be rules established and ways developed that ensure the protection of information. Once this is done, the onus will be on webmasters to correctly implement these rules on their web sites.

We must prevent declining privacy by protecting information that we regard as sensitive. To expect search engines or anyone else to do this for us is not going to work. Companies and government agencies that have our private information must be made to ensure its protection and penalized for any unauthorized release of that information.