Personal privacy is dead and no amount of EU legislation
can revive it, says Simon Moores. Your only hope is to keep off the
web.
“Corporate
security is an illusion," writes Kevin Mitnick, probably the
world’s most notorious ûber-hacker and so, he comments, “is
personal financial privacy”.
Online privacy has
been a myth for more than three years now since Sun boss Scott
McNealy pronounced it "dead on arrival". "If you're online, you
have zero privacy," he said. I have to agree with him.
I wasn’t planning
to write about security or privacy today, but one of the inevitable
pieces of morning spam has just arrived, this time from
“Clic2Cars”, who believe I’m a new Porsche prospect.
We all suffer from
spam, but what’s doubly annoying is having one’s e-mail details
bartered around without permission. In Europe, we have data
protection laws that are supposed to prevent this happening, and
Clic2Cars have the appropriate legal text clearly displayed at the
end of their "message". It reads:
“This message is
sent to you from our client's lists and is in compliance with the
Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002. This is a
commercial communication which includes an automatic unsubscribe
which will immediately remove your e-mail from their mailing list
for any future transmissions”.
But as I am
extremely careful to opt out of any direct mail service and have
had my fax number registered in the same manner, I have to wonder
why my own e-mail address is, apparently, up for sale?
The problem can be
much worse. Last week, IBM in Canada "lost" a hard drive containing
the records of 180,000 clients of an insurance company. As you
might expect, this had all the information that you would expect to
give to your insurers - mother’s maiden name, social security
number, bank details, medical history, inside leg measurement and
so on.
Most of us have
now conceded that the privacy battle is lost and there’s a sinister
glimpse of what the future holds for us in the film Minority
Report, where Tom Cruise is stripped of all privacy wherever he may
be. Today, however, it becomes increasingly obvious that if you
have bought anything online since your first uncertain steps on the
internet, then your personal information - including your home
address and credit card number - is probably accessible via the
internet, and available to anyone who might wish to harvest the
details for commercial purposes.
The arrival of a
more joined-up internet in the shape of web services will probably
remove any last vestiges of privacy left to us. As company systems
become more connected through their .net-like supply chain, there’s
likely to be even more sharing of information, including customer
data among companies, and I doubt that even the best-intentioned
mountain of legislation from Brussels will make a jot of
difference.
After all, if you
only risk five years in jail from the Hague court for war crimes,
there’s not a great deal of deterrence where data protection and
privacy laws are concerned, is there?
What do
you think?
Is online privacy
a myth?
Tell us in an e-mail >> CW360.com reserves
the right to edit and publish answers on the Web site. Please state
if your answer is not for publication.
ZentelligenceSetting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of the futurist writer, broadcaster and Computer Weekly
columnist Simon Moores.