I remember the first time I read George Orwell’s "Nineteen Eighty Four". As a teenager, coming to terms with who I was as an individual, I just knew there was one facet of life for Winston Smith that I wouldn’t like...
While he was lost in his thoughts, Winston’s body had been performing the exercises routinely. Now he is suddenly startled out of his reverie by the instructress from the telescreen addressing him directly. Shouting at him as "6079 Smith W" the woman tells him to pay more attention and recalls him to the regimented present where each man is a coded number and the telescreens spy on every activity.
And now we’re on the net. Where even an old hack like me has forgotten the future Orwell tried to warn us about. Because I post online. In quite a few places. Never mind The Party collecting all your secrets. Nowadays, we just give them to Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace.
I’m very careful not to put anything that can bite me on the ass. I never mention the good and bad times at work, I limit describing where I am to a population group larger than 50,000. But some aren't as careful.
Welcome to a world of, and beyond, Google searches.
More after the flip.
Teenagers may "scare the living shit out of" My Chemical Romance, but this just might frighten the living crap out of your teenagers. And you.
First of all, a video from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: Think Before You Post.
Just how much information is out there about you? I’ll show you how you are on more databases than you are probably comfortable with, and how anyone with nefarious intent could use basic human psychology to use that info for their own good. Usually to the detriment of others.
Level 1 - simple searches. This is a link to Google, but any of the search engines give similar results. For this example, I’ll use myself. Enter ShawnGBR into the search and see what I can see...
First of all, my posts on DailyKos are archived. I had a PowerPC Mac G3 computer in 2004, one of the pages reports. There’s a link from that page to an AT&T website, but it’s a dead-end, so I’m either not with them any more or I stopped using that webspace. I posted on a camera forum, so you can see what kind of camera I got for Christmas, but you can see that too from one of my videos on YouTube. But that’s OK... I make them available because I’m always ‘criminally minded’ when I record and edit my videos. Criminally minded? This is an expression coined by rapper KRS-One to mean you’re not criminally active, but you know that other people are so inclined, and you make sure you don’t become a victim. If you clutch your bag just that bit tighter if it’s late and you’re alone, and you try not to look like you’re lost, and the mace is at the ready, congratulations. You may have avoided becoming a victim of crime by being criminally minded.
What’s funny is some of information that has noting to do with me. This page shows I had a discussion about beers from around the world (true), but the response is some hate-filled spew that never appeared on the forum in question. I only found it now by doing this search, I’ve never heard of derkeiler.com, so I wonder if this is some automated method to generate spam using names from Usenet / Google Groups. Looking at the next link down on the Google results, I see it was posted in soc.culture.canada ...I’ve never been to Canada, but I did notice some review I posted on Amazon is on Amazon.ca. Another version of the post, different spew but still hate-filled, in alt.sports.soccer.manchester.united ...and yes, I am a Manchester United fan (searching Google Groups makes that obvious). The randomness of it all, though ...definitely looks like automated junk that is trying to elicit a response (if not from me, then anyone that takes umbrage with the contents of the posts).
So imagine someone as proficient as me online ...but not as careful with their content. Posting their address or their most intimate details. Google saves quite a lot. And there are hundreds of things that I have posted using this Username. Found in half a second.
But as long as you're careful, you can still pour your heart out on the net and still remain anonymous. Just don't use the same Username for everything, and don't use your actual name for anything!
Level 2 - Intelius. Live in the know. This is a website I’ve used at work, just to confirm the spelling of people’s names. From the front page, I can enter a name and a State and the site will show me a summary of people that match that search.
I decided to look for anyone named Robert Barker in California (Bob Barker seemed like a nice name!). There are 229 matches. The first, a Robert Blaine Barker, previously lived in New York and Illinois. He’s 65. And for a small fee (or if I wanted, I could subscribe and search to my heart’s content), I can access his date of birth. And his criminal record, if any. His bankruptcies, if any. Relatives. Past addresses. His current phone number. I could learn things about anyone I knew the name of, or just learn about a random person I may never meet in my entire life. But I’m guessing this is all publicly available data, and there’s no chance that someone could steal his, or my, or anyone’s identity in this way.
You’re certainly not able to get inside the head of the person, to gain access to a person’s real identity, their thoughts, their patterns of behavior.
Level 3 - Spokeo. I’m guessing that most of you have never heard of Spokeo.com. It takes what I did of myself in Level 1 and kicks it up a notch. All you do is provide a single web-based email address and it trawls the internet for the details of other people you have received emails from or with. For this example, I will use someone that Spokeo found information for me. I will only say that I have only met this woman once, in connection with a community action group I joined two weeks ago. I shall call her Woman X.
The program found that Woman X uses Pandora.com, an online radio program. Three hours ago, X created a program called QuickMix. On the 12th, she created one called 70’s. For whatever reason, she chose Montuno (live) by Lalo Schifrin as a favorite track. She has also created a Bob Dylan station of music that is either by, or sounds like, Bob Dylan.
And Spokeo shows me when things were updated. It's possible to correlate just when Woman X is at her computer.
And I can follow the links to listen to these musical choices. I have absolutely no interest in this woman, her life, how she feels ...yet what if she creates a playlist called ‘Today’s The Day I Leave the Gas On’? I’m sure she thinks her musical lists are private to her, and maybe someone will randomly stumble across them and think "hey, that’s a cool tune". I don’t think she knows that there’s a ‘hyper-aggregator’ website that syndicates blogs, photos, and videos from social networks and web feeds. And I just got a peek of something I didn’t want to see. Sure: the information is out there for those that want to snoop around, but we are now in an age where snooping is for amateurs.
So imagine two people where one DOES have designs on the other. And they use the information from this site, that also automatically trawls Bebo, Blogger, DailyMotion, DeviantArt, Digg, Flickr, Fotolog, Friendster, HI5, ImageStation, Imeem, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Netlog, Photobucket, PictureTrail, Vox, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Wretch, Xanga, Yahoo Video, and YouTube (and more besides) ...to get an insight on that other person that gives them an unfair advantage in getting to know the other person really well. REALLY well.
Scary. Especially if that other person is your child.
It might be time to give your kid the talk about protection. Online protection.