MSNBC Tracking your every move
"A Boston technology firm is surreptitiously tracking computer users across the Internet on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, a practice that demonstrates the limits of a recent agreement to protect the privacy of Web surfers."

"Pharmatrak officials say the information they collect about browsing habits enables participating drug companies to compare and improve their Web sites. They don’t collect names and don’t intend to, they say.

But they claim they can predict whether visitors are consumers, physicians, journalists or government officials, based on where they come from and what they access.

And the company’s Web site also suggests that it has plans to identify people. “In the future, we may develop products and services which collect data that, when used in conjunction with the tracking database, could enable a direct identification of certain individual visitors,” it says, adding that they would never take advantage of such information."

redux [07.02.00]
Online Journalism Review The Final Days of Privacy
"The recent admission by the White House drug office that it routinely dropped "cookies" onto the hard drives of those who accessed its Web site would have seemed, in more innocent times, like a friendly gesture. It's difficult to think of cookies as menacing. But in the brave new world of the Internet, where privacy has been sacrificed on the altar of a technologically fueled avarice, the cookies being referred to are more accurately thought of as creepy crawlers--small text files inserted surreptitiously into your computer to stalk your every movement on the Internet."

"In this case, the spying was done by a government agency, but it's a practice common to the way business--including the Los Angeles Times Web site--is conducted on the Internet. DoubleClick, the private company that did the Drug Enforcement Administration's snooping, routinely gathers such data for business use and already has profiles of the vital statistics, habits and tastes of 100 million Americans."

"The goal of the snooper industry is to use any means--cookies are one, Web bugs invisible to the naked eye embedded in the graphics of Web pages you visit are another--to pierce that shell of privacy that humans erect for their basic sense of security. Widespread paranoia can be expected to be the norm when the books you buy, the songs you hear, the medical advice you seek, your religious, political and social beliefs and financial holdings become the stuff of common currency available to all who snoop, whether for profit or pursuits more perverse."

redux [07.18.00]
ComputerUser Medical Privacy Concerns Heightened by Genome Mapping By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
"Privacy advocates, still reeling from last year's passage of legislation that allows banks and insurance companies to share personal information, are bracing against a new threat to the confidentiality of medical and financial information: The Human Genome Project.

"Latanya Sweeney, professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said currently more than 40 US states have laws requiring hospitals to make available to insurance companies and researchers certain information about each visit they receive, including the diagnosis, birth date, ethnicity, gender and Zip code of all patients discharged.

While state regulations say such categories are sufficiently anonymous to conceal the identity of patients, Sweeney said companies can and do match such information with personally identifiable data, using just a few publicly available resources."

""It may surprise some to know that 87 percent of the US population is uniquely identifiable today by just their birthday, gender and zip code," Sweeney said."

"Sweeney said the stakes become much higher when genetic information comes into play. For instance, she said, gender can usually be identified using just the base of a person's DNA sequence. Using a larger chunk of DNA information, researchers can infer particular diseases by catalogued and known sequence patterns. Link those sequences to publicly available hospital data, and you have an undeniably complete picture of an individual's most private information, Sweeney said."

redux [01.31.00]
The Christian Science Monitor "Database Nation" -- Big Business, not Big Brother, greatest danger to privacy
"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "

redux [04.30.00]
Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference 2000 Audio Transcripts: Neal Stephenson Dinner Speach