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Communications of the ACM
Electronic Frontier: The Privacy Hoax
The millions of "check-ins" generated by foursquare, the location-based social networking site, can be used to create a dynamic view of a city's workings and character, Carnegie Mellon University researchers say.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
Privacy in the digital age is dead. At best, one of our most cherished rights as members of a free society is on life support, kept alive by cybercratic ramblings of an electronic fringe unable to come to grips with reality.
In a police lineup of the usual suspects fingered as the biggest privacy abusers, the government is an easy mark. Too easy.
No, the biggest abuse of privacy is in the workplace, followed closely by the ordinary Joes and Janes of our global village. These privacy assassins wield what is, ironically, the one truly "killer app," of the information ageemail.
I should know. I'm a privacy abuser.
Confessions of the Abuser
I am an unwitting abuser. The practice comes to me unbidden, unwanted. Yet several times a day I find myself prying into the most private of electronic moments.
I've scanned agendas of illicit love affairs. I've seen an attorney tell a beleaguered client that he'd better settle because, "I can't lie to you; we're getting killed in court."
I've seen pictures of family outings that never make it to Grandma's inbox. And I've been sent the digital equivalent of name, rank, and serial number of the "Smith" kids, ages 8, 10 and 12, information that I could, if bent in any demented way, abuse in a most heinous manner.
I read these private thoughts, ingest this personal information, because although email may be efficient, the silicon engines that deliver it are stupid.
You see, I own the domain cyberwire.com, which I registered to house my Internet publication, CyberWire Dispatch. Meanwhile, a Utah-based ISP called CyberWire, Inc. registered cyberwireS.com. You can see where this train wreck is headed.
Some CyberWire, Inc. subscribers foolishly configure their email address, as cybewire.com, forgetting to add the "S." And when someone tries to send subscribers an email or respond to one of their messagesto their non-existent cyberwire.com addressit bounces into my inbox.
Yes, I've contacted the postmaster of cyberwires.com. He was apathetic about such privacy concerns. "We're changing things, to 'cyber-wire.com' and telling people to be careful," he wrote. The efforts haven't stopped the daily flow of private email into my mailbox.
Rude Awakenings
Sometimes I reply to these errant messages, sending responses laced with what can only be called savage profanity. It's for shock value. I make no excuses. I mean it as a wake up call to an increasingly clueless community of Internet citizens.
Readers of this column are certainly more savvy than the newly minted America Online subscriber. But intimate knowledge of email's inherent lack of privacy is a dangerous thing. It leads to complacency.
We all need a wake up call to just how much privacy is leaking out via a tool some 40 million of us use every day, scarcely giving a thought to whether or not our electronic missives might one day be trotted out for public inspection, criticism or ridicule.
Intimate knowledge of email's inherent lack of privacy is a dangerous thing. It leads to complacency.
Recent events only serve to cement just how porous the idea of "private email" really is.
The most notorious recent example is the rape of personal privacy foisted on the public by none other than the U.S. Congress, courtesy of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and his investigation of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.
More than 60,000 pages of evidence are now in the public record. Among these documents are megabytes of email sent by Lewinsky or received by Lewinsky. Much of it deals only with cursory issues involved in the investigation, yet reams of personal information are divulged, written by friends of Lewinsky who never, not for a nanosecond, ever imagined that some senior citizen in Toledo would one day be reading their private thoughts.
For example, in the back-and- forth correspondence between Lewinsky and a friend living overseas, we are treated to the private facts about the friend's family members. Although Lewinsky's dealings with her friend may have some slight bearing on the investigation, there is absolutely no need to learn that the friend's brother is having marital problems, will be getting divorced, and probably has some kind of deep-seeded character flaw that requires therapy.
Yet all these details are laid bare; names are named, reputations smolder in the ashes.
Electronic Democracy Leaks
Ever correspond with a government employee via email? Maybe you've met at a trade show, shared some concerns about the reliability of the product your company is selling to the government. The two of you promise to carry on the dialog ... via email.
Has it ever occurred to you that your employer, a competitor, or a reporter digging for a good story can snap up these personal correspondences simply by requesting them?
That's right, thanks to a wonderful little tool called the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), all email sitting on government hard disks are considered records and subject to FOIA requests.
I learned this lesson the hard way several years ago when my supposedly private messages to an official of the National Science Foundation suddenly showed up in the hands of another reporter who had filed a FOIA request.
Although my messages were fairly benign in nature, the episode jolted me and changed forever the nature of my email exchanges with government employees.
No Safe Harbor
We are all aware that any messages written on the company email system belongs to the company. The powers that be are free to snoop, at will, through our inboxes, ransack our stored files. Basically, your thoughts are not your own when you're on the company dime.
Given that, most know not to launch a drive to unionize the workplace using the company email system, to abstain from saying "bad things" about the boss, or sending dirty jokes to Al in Accounting.
But how many of you have wanted to impress the boss with a late-night email that recounts in vivid detail your surefire strategy for derailing the competition? A message that lays out how, with a few strong-arm tactics, you can keep that new Silicon Valley, Wall-Street Darling from cutting into market share, say, a strategy of manipulating licensing agreements that will "cut off its air supply."
Nothing wrong with that, right? Hey, the boss appreciates the aggressiveness. When you live on Internet time, the slow-to-react get eaten alive. They also might get dragged into court by an equally aggressive Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
Scores of employees, from product managers to chief executive officers, are now busy defending emails they wrote years ago in the courtroom where the government is prosecuting Microsoft for alleged antitrust violations. Indeed, much of the government's case is drawn from the electronic paper trail of corporate email.
In the early weeks of the case, there was no small amount of sweat breaking out on the upper lips of Netscape employees that had contributed to an internal "complaint fest" mailing list. On that list, employees routinely and profanely criticized their company and its products. Netscape knows and condones the mailing list. "It lets them blow off a little steam," said Netscape CEO James Barksdale while on the witness stand. But none of those employees ever expected those messages might end up being read by the public at large.
Microsoft gobbled up all those messages as evidence and at one point looked to make them public. Microsoft, for whatever reason, choose to only highlight a single message, causing reporters to groan and a lot of Netscape employees to breath a sigh of relief.
And it's not just the government hunting for such internal emails. Lawyers across the land are now recognizing that a gold mine of incriminating evidence can be found in corporate emails.
Indeed, the debacle of watching Microsoft's Bill Gates on videotape, which is shown routinely in the courtroom, stumble through answers to questions about his own personal email, tossed at him by government lawyers, has caused a high-level scramble among corporate suits as they review their own internal email policies.
Think Again and Again
By now you're all screaming at me that if something's really that important, there's always the encryption route. Nice concept, woeful execution. Here's the cold, hard reality of crypto: only an insignificant fraction of email is ever encrypted.
In more than 15 years of sending email, I've never once sent an encrypted message, never once received one. I can't imagine that I'm alone.
So, think again about the next time you sit down to fire off that private email. It just might show up in the hands of some cut-throat lawyer or splashed across the headlines of an article in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.
Oh, and a private note to James P. in Utah.
You might want to reconfirm that secret weekend getaway you have planned with Susan W. while your wife's on that business trip. Susan never got the message; I did. If I was a real nice guy, I'd forward you the message from your wife, telling you business wrapped up sooner than she expected and that she'll be home for the weekend.
But I suspect you know that ... by now.
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