Transparent You & Me

In the wake of AOL's search information debacle, several people have taken up its implications. Tom Foremski concludes:

The AOL incident has placed Internet users on notice that their lives are transparent, even in unguarded moments, even when searching for something, anything, even when companies say they are not collecting identifiable data.
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Your every click and keystroke online is being collected by many different organisations, and that means that at some point it will be possible to track it all, and identify most of it. Welcome to the future transparency of your life.

Robin Harris, in StorageMojo, seconds Foremski, saying "we are what we search," and he advises us to name our children something simple, common, so that they can't be quickly and easily targeted by the search engines. He's right, of course, but it's still weird advice.

Harris also affirms Foremski's tactics: "to poison the database, to create a smokescreen, to use aliases/avatars ..." However, according to Bruce Schneier, poisoning the database or creating a smokescreen is more difficult than it seems, for a number of reasons. Even using aliases or avatars has its problems. We would still have to worry about various law enforcement agencies and their ability to force whoever maintains these pseudonyms to put aside your masks and tell who you really are.

However, if you're mainly concerned about being profiled and tracked by advertisers, stalkers, and nuisances of various kinds, nyms are an excellent choice. And nyms offer the ability to extend yourself into the marketplace on your own terms.

But I must mention again the possibility of anonymized Web use, as offered by Tor and Relakks. If your search engine records don't connect to you at all, you probably don't have to worry about anyone short of the NSA tracking you down--and even they might not find it that easy.

Comments

[Pamela Dingle]

Funny, I've argued exactly the opposite strategy for naming children. I personally think that that when correlated with IP address information, location searches, or searches for friends and/or loved ones, even the John Smiths of the world should be concerned. If you're going to try to go with the "noise" strategy, I would suggest naming your child "Britney Spears" or "Justin Timberlake". That way nobody would be able to tell a vanity search from bad taste in mustic. Plus, I'm sure that after a few decades of therapy, your child would thank you (-:

My suggestion: vanity searches and everyday stuff goes on your everyday search engine (preferably not authenticated to yahoo, google, etc when you search - why hand it to them on a silver platter, right?) Searches that might be considered personally embarrassing should be done with a service like http://blackboxsearch.com. Not that blackboxsearch.com can't be subpoenaed, but at least I'm pretty sure they won't be embarking on any well-intentioned data releases any time soon, plus if you are careful, your name searches are stored in a different database than your kinky date searches (-:

Cheers,

Pam