Public & private lines blur in the Matrix

Central Jersey is in the house—or should I say —on Facebook, with more than 500 search results for groups related to “Central Jersey.” Almost 20 of those groups, ranging in membership from two to 532 members, are about Central Jersey generally. The New Brunswick fan page has over 2150 fans.

 

If you’re on Facebook—and there’s a good chance you are—you’re among 350 million plus people worldwide who are storing much of their personal information on the Internet… indefinitely.

 

If you have a Gmail account, you're among more than 146 million users whose every e-mailed word is not only archived (whether you delete it or not) but also analyzed and used to market to you through Google Adwords, among other ways. If you use hotmail, Yahoo, or other Web-based e-mail services, you're not immune. If you use Google as your search engine, Google saves your search strings and IP address every time you search. Are you concerned?

Does it bother you that Facebook recently made it impossible to hide your friend list (only restoring it to some degree after a hailstorm of complaints)?

Maybe it should. According to Cambridge University Security Group researcher Joseph Bonneau, “the social graph…” that is, your friends list, “is actually the most important information to keep private.” Your friends list can leave you vulnerable to scams and the ability to make inferences about you, according to Bonneau. Further, despite privacy policies, third parties like marketers can reconstruct your identity.

In light of concern that airport security will see our naked bodies on the new X-ray machines ostensibly intended to prevent any more underwear bombers, concerns about privacy on Facebook, Gmail and other places on the Internet might not seem like such a big deal. While you might fear “deep packet inspection” by the TSA while on line at the airport, it’s what’s already happening online to your Internet communications.

 

Using the Internet for everything—writing letters and short notes, finding old friends, posting photos to photo sites like Flickr, shopping, banking, paying bills, and even working—has become second-nature to most of us, as has social networking for many of us. But like driving a car, most of us can get from here to there without really understanding what is happening under the hood. And we don’t much care, until we have to fork over $600 to a mechanic or someone has run up thousands of dollars in credit card charges using our name and personal information, commandeered from the Internet.

 

Not knowing at least enough about your tires and brakes to bring your car in can put you in harm’s way, and what you don’t know about how the Internet, and particularly social networking, works can hurt you.

There are at least three areas where you ought to be concerned: 1) What do companies that have access to your Internet communications DO with all that information? 2) What expectations of privacy can you have for information you store in the Cloud (on someone else’s servers)? and 3) Are you going to get scammed or have your identity, passwords, or credit card info stolen?

The answers are 1) more than you think, 2) still unclear, and 3) yes, if you’re not careful.

So what about “deep packet inspection?” If you’ve wondered about what happens during your e-mails’ travels, imagine your grade-school paper friend Flat Stanley, and his postcards from the various places he visits. When Flat Stanley writes home, you don’t just check for your address. You read the whole message: “Toledo is amazing! Wish you were here.”

 

Similarly, as your e-mail—or Facebook message—passes through various inspection points on its way from your outbox to Aunt Millie’s inbox, deep pack inspection looks not just at the headers, but at the content as well. (Or in the parlance of airport security, they’re interested not just in the contents of your pockets, but also the contents of your pants).

 

What do they do with that information? In plenty of cases, they’re watching out for spam, viruses and fraud. (You’re thinking, “That’s great! I’m protected!”) Some of the time, professional data aggregators such as Bright Planet engage in data mining, or what they call “Deep Web harvesting,” selling the statistical and other information for a profit.

Deep Web research companies say that whereas Google (the search engine that has spun off Gmail and the rest of the “Google suite”) recently indexed its trillionth Web page—which is now called the Surface Web; the Deep Web—“the unknown or hidden data that conventional Web searches can’t find…is thousands of times larger than the Surface Web,” according to Bright Planet. Data aggregator companies collect, analyze and sell that data to business, government and the “intelligence community,” the latter involving projects of Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.

Like the promise of the Internet itself, the Deep Web has been heralded as representing opportunities for more open information access. The Deep Web also plays on the Internet’s roots (i.e., the defense industry and the counterculture), but also the realities of marketing in the name of business and “intelligence” in the name of the “war on terror” versus the right to freedom of speech and the concept of unrestricted access to information. An essential question is whose rights are we talking about anyway? Yours or corporate? (Or are these indistinguishable due to corporate personhood?)

So many people have put so much information out on the Web that it probably feels like closing the barn door after the cows got out, to be talking about privacy now. But notwithstanding Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments that user’s personal information should be public by default, the Center for Digital Democracy has made the point that “Tracking people’s every move online is a fundamental invasion of their privacy.”

In a recent essay Clay Shirky, NYU adjunct professor of new media, suggests that we should see online tracking as essentially a situation in which people are eavesdropping on our conversations. Imagine that you are sitting in the Menlo Park Mall food court chatting with your friends and a marketer sidles up to within earshot and begins to take notes of your conversation. “What is your definition of privacy? What is your expectation?” Shirky asks. If nothing else, what is the creep factor?

Derrick Jensen posits philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design for the Panopticon, as “a metaphor for the power relations that undergird modern civilization.” The Panopticon is a prison where “[b]ecause prisoners can never tell whether or when they are being watched, they have no choice but to presume that at every moment, they are under surveillance.”

 

The nature of Gmail and similar programs that use Cloud storage—your e-mails can be stored in excess of 180 days on their servers and search and mail functions are linked, for instance—raises important questions regarding loss of legal protection and a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” according to Electronic Frontier Foundation Board Chair and Internet entrepreneur Brad Templeton.

 

Shirky sums up our dilemma: “If somehow as a society, we don’t carve out some space for documented personal action that’s ok, then we will really have robbed young people of something they won’t even know that they’re missing, because they never leave the net of surveillance.” Or the Panopticon?

In upcoming articles, we will explore other questions of how use of the Internet has changed how we live and interact, and how to manage our online lives.