I see that the press picked up on the presentation by Greg Conti, a computer science professor at the United States Military Academy. The basic premise was collecting the Internet cache data, showing it to the user, and then asking the user to filter out the information that should not be shared with the public. Most people will filter out personal information, personal locations, SSNs or credit card numbers. Greg Conti showed that normally it’s anywhere between 10% and 31% that we ourselves decide we wouldn’t like to share.
Now let’s remember that search engines out there get all that information, and a portal with wide variety of services (he used an example of Google, but I guess one could come up with numerous other ones) would contain even more information, such as friends’ e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and interesting places we look up on the map.
Overall, the presentation didn’t strike me as anything special (maybe I spent too much time inside the Internet industry). It’s the same argument we’ve heard before, and solution usually is that if you’re paranoid, try to disclose as little information about yourself as possible. It also rings a bell, if you recall John Battelle‘s Database of intentions:
The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.
Now to quote Conti’s presentation:
“I was shocked, and I think other people will be shocked, to learn the information they’ve been handing over,” Conti said in an interview ahead of his presentation. “What we’re doing is implicitly trusting a handful of companies with a tremendous amount of our personal information.”
