Much more of this and I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy nut.
All right, most people would have to admit that the school library fingerprinting kids was a bit creepy. And my piece on Google a while back was not wholly paranoid, given that they have flaunted copyright laws and it has taken numerous countries and one almighty court case to try and get them to behave. So I’m not quite in Jim Corr territory yet.
Yet.
I’ve been asked on a number of occasions why I don’t have a Facebook page. I did briefly have a MySpace page a while back, but gave it up almost immediately for a few reasons. The main reason was the lack of control I had over the content. This might sound odd, coming from someone who has a pretty extensive website and a regular blog, all of which can be read and seen by anyone on the web. I don’t use Twitter, but I wouldn’t rule it out. But on a social networking site, you can choose what level of security you have, and what people can see the content, right?
Here’s what PC World’s website had to say about the privacy settings Facebook was using up until the end of May this year:
‘Achieving maximum privacy on Facebook now requires you to click through 50 settings and more than 170 options. And even that won’t completely safeguard your info. To fully understand Facebook’s updated stance on privacy and your personal data, you’d have to wade through the company’s 5,830-word privacy policy. That, as the astute crew from The New York Times noticed, is 1,287 words longer than the United States Constitution‘
Faced with millions of pissed-off users, Facebook have caved in and apparently made their privacy controls tighter, and more simple to use, but the reviews are still mixed.
To put it plainly, the security measures you might be counting on to keep complete strangers from seeing personal stuff about you or your friends probably isn’t secure enough. Whatever you do, you are publishing your private life online, and it’s dangerous to assume that you can stick personal stuff up there and keep it hidden from the rest of the world.
In my opinioin, it’s dodgy to put up pictures anywhere of your kids. Where I show my kids on my blog, you can’t see their faces – that’s deliberate. And the site that’s hosting your page may not be telling how it’s using all the handy info you’re posting about the things you like and the things you do and what your friends like and do. 
Are all those neat little boxes you fill in treated with the same level of privacy, or are some more public than others? The company may not get rid of your information if you close your account, and they may not tell you how long they’ll be hanging on to that personal data.
And information on the web is a bit like a virus. Once it’s out there, there’s no getting it back. You can’t jump back onto the cliff. And all that loose information can start taking different shapes and doing things you – or even the host companies – can’t predict.
On Saturday, the 28th of May, ‘The Irish Times’ ran an article by Karlin Lillington about Google and Facebook. It highlighted the lack of control people have over the personal information they put online. Many people kid themselves (consciously or subconsciously) that they’re a different person on their Facebook page than they are in real life. But there’s still a lot of you there, and I’ve always been very wary of what I do and don’t make available to the public.
It’s simple. You have to assume that anything you put on the web without serious encryption can be nicked. In fact, serious encryption still might not keep your information safe.
By having a website and a blog, rather than a networking site, I’m not fooling myself about what people can and can’t see. This way, I won’t be left with my virtual arse hanging in the breeze when all my embarrassing stories and photos go global. That’s the theory anyway. I could just add the same stuff to a Facebook page, but that’d be another platform to maintain, and I’d have to put up with another inlet for junk, including things like companies that mine the profiles of Facebook users.
You might or might not be aware that Google has cars going around the country, taking photos of streets to put online for their Street View project. They are not asking permission to show you if you appear in any of the photos. Not so bad, really, as this happens on television all the time. What I didn’t know until I read the ‘Irish Times’ article, was that they were also scanning wireless networks:
‘This month Google confirmed it had been collecting data sent over Irish wireless networks – the network name and equipment serial numbers – as part of its Street View process, to see which homes and businesses were using Google Maps on mobiles. The company also confirmed more generally to European data-protection commissioners that it had collected any unprotected data being sent across networks at the time its Street View vehicles were in the area but that this process had ceased and was “a mistake”. All Irish data collected was said to have been destroyed.’
So they’ve got cars going round like TV license inspectors, scanning for signals. If you have a wireless modem, and they drive past, they can pick up on the signal. And they’ve been recording any unencrypted information (such as the bits that identify the signal and the equipment) that they pick up. So . . . paranoid yet?
And in case you think there’s nothing potentially toxic on your networking site, here’s another quote from that article:
‘Consider the case of Stacy Snyder. This 25-year-old American student and mother finished her studies to become a school teacher in 2006 – and then was refused her certificate by university authorities because of behaviour inappropriate for a teacher. That “behaviour” was a picture of herself at a party, dressed as a pirate and holding a plastic cup, which she had uploaded to her MySpace page with the caption “drunken pirate”. Her case went to the courts – which upheld the right of the university to deny her teaching credentials [my emphasis].
‘Many people do not realise that, once posted online, information is almost impossible to obliterate. Many social networks allow a user to cancel their profile – but retain the data in case they want to re-establish them later. As new data goes online, search engines such as Bing and Google permanently archive billions of bits of that information daily.’
This complete disregard for privacy is worrying, but in some ways it’s the way this information is just taken and filed, often to be sold or just passed on, with little or no consideration about the future consequences that’s far more insidious. Above all, it’s just plain careless. 
It’s not a New World Order that worries me so much (it does worry me a bit – but I’m not joining the X-Files yet, Jim) – it’s more the idea of a completely disordered world, where information is collected without any real necessity, and stored just because a company can, rather than being driven by any deliberate motives. As users of the web, we have to be more careful with the information we let out there. There are too many companies who want to take it and use it, and sell it or lose it. And you can never tell what’ll be used against you or when.
Companies of this size are enormously powerful, and it’s healthy to be a bit suspicious of anyone with that kind of power. But it’s not a conspiracy I’m most worried about. It’s that, at the heart of all these incredibly complex information gathering systems, there are human beings who are bound to screw up. And when they do, they could be doing it with some essential piece of me.
