On-line Privacy Concerns Grow

[TheMercenary]

Some interesting things to keep in mind as our world becomes more digital.

To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard, there is an obvious explanation for this kind of repurposing of information — there is so much information out there. Supply creates demand, he argues.

“This is a broader truth about the law,” he writes in an e-mail message. “There are often no requirements to keep records, but if they’re kept, they’re fair game for a subpoena.”

And we are presented with what Professor Zittrain calls the “deadbeat dad” problem. There are government investigators, divorcing spouses, even journalists, who have found creative ways to exploit the material. “So many databases,” he writes, “as simple as highway toll collection records or postal service address changes, lend themselves to other uses, such as finding parents behind on their child support payments.”

Perhaps a more direct explanation is that data collection is part of what Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls “the surveillance business model.” That is, there is money to be made from knowing your customers well — with a depth unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track obsessively online behavior.

“We took whatever was done offline and put it on steroids,” she said, perhaps with the Rodriguez case in the back of her mind. “It requires compliance with the kind of promises that comes with this kind of data collection.”

The foundation argues that online service providers — social networks, search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball players’ union is now facing. The union is being criticized for failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them. “You don’t want to know that stuff,” she says, speaking of the ordinary blogger collecting data on every commenter. “You don’t want to get a subpoena. For ordinary Web sites it is a cost to collect all this data.”

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The digital format makes it easy to cling to material that normally would be disposed of or would disintegrate. Storage is cheap and practically limitless. And Ms. Cohn says of the people who dominate the Internet, “the people who design software, in my experience, tend to be pack rats.”

Journalists are sometimes advised to destroy their notes every few months so that they can’t be used in a lawsuit. Yet, somehow you want those notes — you see only how they could set you free, or lead you back to a new story, not prove your guilt.

continues:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/te...link.html?_r=1