Our surveillance society goes online
Being able to make your own decisions and hold your own views without interference; controlling information about yourself; and being in charge of your personal space - these basic elements of privacy are under threat, according to a new book, The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It, by Kieron O'Hara and Nigel Shadbolt, two computer scientists at the University of Southampton. While our offline activities are tracked by CCTV cameras, Oyster cards and RFID tags, the details of our online searches and purchases accumulate in databases that know more about us than we'd tell our closest friends. Many of us also broadcast our lives through blogs and social networking sites. "When one's self as a social entity, with history, with transactions, is all out there, then privacy is not the same old notion," says Shadbolt, who is professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton and one of the leading scientists shaping the protocols for the future internet. <snip> The authors' concerns are backed up by Privacy International's 2007 survey, which showed a worsening of privacy protection throughout the world. The UK fared badly, with the lowest privacy ranking in the EU - putting it in the "endemic surveillance" category with Russia and Singapore. The power of computers makes it easy to share and amalgamate databases to reveal obscure information. Websites in the US use geographical information mashed with registers of convicted sex offenders to produce maps with markers locating the homes and crimes of any notified rapist or paedophile. A couple of years ago, the hacker Tom Owad combined Amazon book wishlists with Google Earth data, filtering to leave only "subversive" literature. The result: a world map of would-be readers of subversive books. Clicking on the location of the would-be reader would reveal a high-resolution satellite image of his or her house. <snip> The potential, suggests Shadbolt, is for a new kind of digital psychometric. "People have to be aware of their digital footprint," he says. If you were rejected for a job on the basis of such an assessment, could you prove it? And what if your digital "shape" showed something suspicious? <snip> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/08/privacy.internet
Being able to make your own decisions and hold your own views without interference; controlling information about yourself; and being in charge of your personal space - these basic elements of privacy are under threat, according to a new book, The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It, by Kieron O'Hara and Nigel Shadbolt, two computer scientists at the University of Southampton. While our offline activities are tracked by CCTV cameras, Oyster cards and RFID tags, the details of our online searches and purchases accumulate in databases that know more about us than we'd tell our closest friends. Many of us also broadcast our lives through blogs and social networking sites. "When one's self as a social entity, with history, with transactions, is all out there, then privacy is not the same old notion," says Shadbolt, who is professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton and one of the leading scientists shaping the protocols for the future internet. <snip> The authors' concerns are backed up by Privacy International's 2007 survey, which showed a worsening of privacy protection throughout the world. The UK fared badly, with the lowest privacy ranking in the EU - putting it in the "endemic surveillance" category with Russia and Singapore. The power of computers makes it easy to share and amalgamate databases to reveal obscure information. Websites in the US use geographical information mashed with registers of convicted sex offenders to produce maps with markers locating the homes and crimes of any notified rapist or paedophile. A couple of years ago, the hacker Tom Owad combined Amazon book wishlists with Google Earth data, filtering to leave only "subversive" literature. The result: a world map of would-be readers of subversive books. Clicking on the location of the would-be reader would reveal a high-resolution satellite image of his or her house. <snip> The potential, suggests Shadbolt, is for a new kind of digital psychometric. "People have to be aware of their digital footprint," he says. If you were rejected for a job on the basis of such an assessment, could you prove it? And what if your digital "shape" showed something suspicious? <snip> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/08/privacy.internet