Your internet friends are your privacy enemies
Image via CrunchBase
After about an hour on Chatroulette, the newest social meeting point for the People of the Internet, it became increasingly clear that it was very easy to find out a lot about someone in only mere minutes. What was surprising was how much information people were willing to give up after only a few moments of conversation: not only where they lived, but where they worked, how old they were, and even – in one case – their past auto accident history. The thing about Chatroulette, though, is that the information you give up is pretty much entirely voluntary. Not divulging personal facts is as simple as pressing ‘next’, or closing the browser.
We like to think that the information we give out on Facebook or MySpace is in the same category – that it’s voluntary, and if our privacy settings are set high enough, protected. But it’s not that simple. Obviously, reading the information we choose to feed into our computers is only one way to find out a lot about us. But the other way is to monitor the people we talk to, or who talk to us.
From Tuesday’s New York Times:
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. […]
You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing. […]
The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people — birthdates and city or state of birth.
That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn’t disclose, although they were related to when the person applied for the number.
Which means that there is some risk – not a guaranteed threat – that sometime in the near future, this kind of information will be available to those who try hard enough to get it. Of course, gaining someone’s Social Security number is the extreme; someone could learn a lot more about you by the time it reaches that point. But the idea that someone wishing you happy birthday via Facebook might help somebody else steal your identity is, to say the least, annoying. The benign internet simply doesn’t exist.
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As our means of communication become more sophisticated, removing barriers of distance, our faults are simply magnified. There have always been uninformed people, but previously you needed to go through an editor to get published and acquire a readership.
Similarly, as Charlie Sheen explained on a recent episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, it was not terribly hard “back in the day” to steal incredible amounts of money simply by going through hotel dumpsters for discarded bills and making a few phone calls.
Think of Facebook as a suburban street, like the one where I currently live. If I change with the windows open, somebody will probably catch a glimpse. But with the way trees are arranged on my street, and how the sun shines in, it seems as if I am quite alone. I see my computer and my bed, but my eye rarely focused on what’s beyond the window. With Facebook, most people simply do not think to close the blinds.
There are an array of privacy options that determine who can see what. I am invisible to all but a certain selection of people. If somebody wants to steal my identity, they’ll have to be somebody I already know. In other words, the people most likely to be scammed are the people who would have been most likely to be scammed a hundred years ago.
That being said, it is possible for anyone to get nailed by some scheme, and all we can do is minimize how likely we are to be targeted.
Remember, too, that FOR NOW video and audio is not as easily tracked as text. Online chat archives are easy to access; Tumblr even has an entire function devoted to that, and if you know how to do it, you can apply it even for so-called “private” chats.