The Myth of Internet Privacy

“Most people do not know they are being tracked, and they aren’t given a choice whether to be tracked or to have their online behavior and personal information shared with large networks of advertisers.” – Nancy King, associate professor of business law, Oregon State University

In my final article about the “hidden” internet I will uncover what most of us probably already know – that we are being watched and profiled, not by a nefarious Big Brother government but by private commercial interests. Our browsing, searching and purchasing habits are being tracked, tabulated and targeted.

Most of us know that “cookies” are placed on our computer hard drives when we visit a web site. These bits of code identify us as return visitors and record what we looked at and how long we dwelled on a particular site. This information is also sent to companies which compile this information and sell it to advertisers to target us for marketing pitches based on our purported interests.

Many of us believe that we can disable or delete cookies, but many sites require them enabled in order to use certain sites. And deleting them is of no protection when the information is passed on to a third party. Beyond cookies there are also “beacons” which run on some of the web sites we browse. Because the Beacons reside on the remote site rather than our hard drives, their information collection activities are beyond our reach or control.

Nancy King quoted above warns that there is little in the way of legal protections over our privacy and even scant less governmental oversight with respect to e-commerce and data collection. It is the Wild West out there and business interests seem limited by only what they can get away with.

In some cases this information can be good, sending information out way that we may not need to search for. But a vast majority of consumers do not realize they are being tracked, who is tracking them and what the information is used for. Recently one of my readers was unaware that their IP address can give away their geographic location. Try for yourself: http://www.ip2location.com/

Laws are scant, having not kept up with new technology. Government wire taping restrictions were written for the times when we all had telephones connected via wires to our homes and offices. It is a Brave New World out there and the laws regarding how technologies have not kept up. ⁽¹⁾Wireless connections themselves can open up more opportunities for surveillance and exploitation.

Unfortunately we cannot look to government to protect our interests with respect to Internet privacy; oversight has been recently undermined by the FCC recently adopting business recommendations allowing businesses to disregard ⁽²⁾Net Neutrality.

Instead of a rule to protect Internet users' freedom to choose, the Commission has opened the door for broadband payola - letting phone and cable companies charge steep tolls to favor the content and services of a select group of corporate partners, relegating everyone else to the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.~ Timothy Karr

Read Nancy King’s full article in the Corvallis Oregon Gazette Times, “A Matter of Privacy”

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1. “ Google says mistakenly got wireless data.” – Reuters, May 15, 2010

2. “Net Neutrality is the freedom of speech, freedom of choice issue of the 21st century. It's the guarantee of a more open and democratic media system that was baked into the Internet at its founding.” ~ Obama FCC Caves on Net Neutrality -- Tuesday Betrayal Assured, Timothy Karr, Huffington Post, December 20, 2010.

Truth, Lies and the Internet

Last year I had the dubious pleasure of serving on the board of directors of a Home Owner’s Association (HOA). Normally the administrative functions of the board are rather mundane but occasionally there is that one unique person who likes to keep things interesting.

After having conducted exhaustive research on the internet, this individual felt confident leveling charges against the board of directors that his children’s “asthma-like” symptoms could be squarely blamed on the chemicals applied to the lawns by the association’s landscape contractor. Apparently his children were immune to the dander of their three cats and two dogs in the household.

Gaining no traction in his effort to go “organic” and have the landscape crew pull weeds by hand, he conducted a daring propaganda blitz, skittering around the neighborhood in the dead of night leaving fliers under the door mats of his neighbors in an attempt to warn them of the conspiracy being perpetrated by the nefarious board of directors and their gardening storm troopers.

In public view, he became stoic and civil member of the Landscape Committee, lobbying his evidence to the committee chair – a man whose profession is as a water quality scientist. However, Landscape Poison Crusader, a computer technician by trade, was undeterred; armed with “facts” gleaned from web sites, the noble activist assailed the committee studies of how these chemicals caused cancer, allergies, birth defects and any number of horrible health risks.

But the committee chair politely responded with his own Internet research explaining that the landscape products were all approved by federal, state and municipal authorities for application by professional state-licensed technicians in accordance with manufacturer recommendations. And it was pointed out as well that the intrepid health crusader didn’t seem to mind his children swimming in the community pool… sanitized with equally deadly chemicals.

More recently a member of our local Secular Society became the focus of a rant who is convinced that that the 19 hijackers who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th are alive and well and living abroad and that these acts of terrorism were the work of the CIA to instigate a Bush-lead “Gulf of Tonkin” style pretext for war on Islam. Their source: “credible” Internet web sites.

Today it is possible to instantly retrieve information on any topic imaginable. But sometimes lost in this information cloud is; how much of this information is truthful and useful? I usually try to cite sources when I offer information and opinions; but I am not immune to falling into my own positional bias. We all tend to look for information sources which support our view and discard those which do not.

I the case of the 9/11 conspiracy theorist, this person sought sites which supported their view; dismissing the “official” information as tainted, propaganda, lies. So then how is one to sort out and choose which information to trust and which not? The most direct way is to “consider the source”.

I have sometimes sought health information on the Internet. To my annoyance, often the sites bearing information about, let’s say a vitamin supplement; also provide the opportunity to purchase the item as well. That immediately sets off my credibility alarm. Likewise the sites themselves can provide clues of inherent bias. I’m not sure but a URL with “poisonplanet.com” just might be lacking what one could consider an objective stance. Nancy often restricts her search of health information to known sources such as the CDC or the Mayo Clinic, for example.

But as with 9/11 conspiracy “truth” sites, one can find substantiation that the Holocaust was a hoax, as was the moon landing. One can Googled up evidence that Big Foot stalks the woods of the Pacific Northwest and people are routinely abducted in their sleep by alien spacecraft which perpetrate any manner of probing of their bodies. Who would have known that, remarkably, aliens from millions of light years away are fascinated with our anuses.

Still one cannot be too complacent; dangerous risks all around us. Each of you reading this post may not be aware that the compound Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is being used heavily in YOUR community every day. DHMO is used in fire retardant and as a coolant in nuclear reactors yet it is found in large quantities in our drinking water, rivers; it is even found in acid rain! Be safe – be informed – visit the non-profit Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division www.dhmo.org before it’s too late!

The Internet was Born for Porn

We all have been enjoying the Interweb so much recently we almost cannot imagine a time when it wasn’t here. Google, Blogger and how did we ever live without YouTube? It’s at times like these that we should pause and reflect on a era when the Internet was in its infancy. But it wasn’t until the Internet reached it’s horny adolescence that its technology truly burgeoned and blossomed. And like any adolescent, its meteoric rise to maturity was driven by one singularly driving force – Sex.

Yes, we can thank Porn for the Internet we have today. The lustful pursuit of anonymous lasciviousness heralded the emergence of all those apps and widgets we depend on so much now. That is because most of the Internet technology we rely upon was developed to satisfy the demand to deliver quick, readily accessible, full living color, porn.

I accessed my first internet account two decades ago via a dial-up modem through the local university. Back then, access was free. The precursor of today's Internet, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense (yes, government; not private business) as a "fail-safe" uninterruptible communication system. It connected data centers of mostly governmental, university and some private contractors for research and development purposes. Everything was completely "text-based" back then; single color and rather arcane. We connected between computers using Telnet and transferred data via FTP.

Those early days was an age of technological innocence; like when we used to be able to leave our houses unlocked when we were kids. There was no spam, no virus's and very little in the way of hacking. "Online" civility was the norm; most of us were professionals; engineers, scientists and academics, men predominantly - and young, under-socialized, geeky and horny males, namely, college students.

At first we were sharing information, documents mostly; hosted online and communicating with one another through e-mail. There were also programs and a few rudimentary games, but to transfer them around from place to place one needed to convert the binary files into text to move them over the phone line to the home PC. Once received, the text had to be converted back into binary format. It was a cumbersome process, but occasionally the files yielded a delightful surprise. Some of these binary files contained scans of photos from Penthouse, Playboy and other adult magazines. Below is an example of what raw internet data and picutre files looked like back then:



I must confess that I spent a goodly portion of my online time downloading, concatinating and converting these text files to reveal the salacious pixels within. Never mind that it often took hours of my phone being tied up to eventually see a grainy picture of a naked woman. The silly thing was that I could just as easily see these pictures, in all their glossy glory, were I to just simply schlep down to the local convenience store and purchase the actual magazine. But the fact that we could even DO this process was half the thrill in itself.

But herein lay the magic (and the potential) of this new technology – We no longer had to show our embarrassed faces at the convenience store; we could all now indulge our visual fantasies in the privacy of our own homes.

Parallel to this technological Renaissance came the development of the VCR and cam-corders; heralded as significant a technological advance to the sex business as the Guttenberg printing press was to movable type. Soon techies were piecing together .GIF files in sequence to make staccato zoetrope style rudimentary movies. Similarly motivated engineers soon developed more sophisticated .AVI and .MPG image compression technologies to squeeze multiple images into smoother flowing video files; all of which led directly to the development of the DVD.

By now the World Wide Web and the first web browser had been developed and web sites were popping up like weeds. Converging also were the visionaries who saw the marketing potential of the Internet - and as all marketing types know full well: what else sells better than sex! The nude digital genie had been released from the bottle, there was now no turning back.

Today the porn market has declined to roughly 6% of all internet traffic. It is estimated that at least a quarter of Internet users have accessed an adult web site at some time. "Sex had played a major role in driving many technologies," says Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian at Texas A&M. [1]

“Internet porn sites are also one of the few web services that make money.” [2] Internet pornography … helped spur the adoption of e-commerce, online payment systems, broadband connections, streaming and live video, and much more.” [3]

For better or worse, Internet porn is the “gorilla in the living room” (wink to Mr. Bananas) and though it may not be right out there wiggling directly in your face, it isn’t very difficult to find. Like it or hate it, porn has been instrumental in fleshing out the Internet technology we enjoy today. And who can say - perhaps that's even a good thing.

References

1. “Thank Sex For Making The Internet Hot”, National Public Radio
2. “The dirty secret that drives new technology: it's porn”, The UK Guardian
3. The Economics of Pornography. ~ Kirk Doran