Invasion Of Privacy

By Joshua Quittner
(TIME, August 25, 1997) -- For the longest time, I couldn't get worked up about privacy: my right to it;
how it's dying; how we're headed for an even more wired, underregulated, overintrusive, privacydeprived planet.
I mean, I probably have more reason to think about this stuff than the average John Q. All Too Public. A
few years ago, for instance, after I applied for a credit card at a consumer-electronics store, somebody
got hold of my name and vital numbers and used them to get a duplicate card. That somebody ran up a
$3,000 bill, but the nice lady from the fraud division of the credit-card company took care of it with
steely digital dispatch. (I filed a short report over the phone. I never lost a cent. The end.)
I also hang out online a lot, and now and then on the Net someone will impersonate me, spoofing my Email address or posting stupid stuff to bulletin boards or behaving in a frightfully un-Quittner-like
manner in chat parlors from here to Bianca's Smut Shack. It's annoying, I suppose. But in the end, the
faux Quittners get bored and disappear. My reputation, such as it is, survives.
None of this would bother me in the least, I suspect, if a few years ago, my phone, like Marley's ghost,
hadn't given me a glimpse of the nightmares to come. On Thanksgiving weekend in 1995, someone
(presumably a critic of a book my wife and I had just written about computer hackers) forwarded my
home telephone number to an out-of-state answering machine, where unsuspecting callers trying to
reach me heard a male voice identify himself as me and say some extremely rude things. Then, with
typical hacker aplomb, the prankster asked people to leave their messages (which to my surprise many
callers, including my mother, did). This went on for several days until my wife and I figured out that
something was wrong ("Hey...why hasn't the phone rung since Wednesday?") and got our phone service
restored.
It seemed funny at first, and it gave us a swell story to tell on our book tour. But the interloper who
seized our telephone line continued to hit us even after the tour ended. And hit us again and again for
the next six months. The phone company seemed powerless. Its security folks moved us to one unlisted
number after another, half a dozen times. They put special pin codes in place. They put traces on the
line. But the troublemaker kept breaking through.

If our hacker had been truly evil and omnipotent as only fictional movie hackers are, there would
probably have been even worse ways he could have threatened my privacy. He could have sabotaged
my credit rating. He could have eavesdropped on my telephone conversations or siphoned off my Email. He could have called in my mortgage, discontinued my health insurance or obliterated my Social
Security number. Like Sandra Bullock in The Net, I could have been a digital untouchable, wandering the
planet without a connection to the rest of humanity. (Although if I didn't have to pay back school loans,
it might be worth it. Just a thought.)

Still, I remember feeling violated at the time and as powerless as a minnow in a flash flood. Someone
was invading my private space--my family's private space--and there was nothing I or the authorities
could do. It was as close to a technological epiphany as I have ever been. And as I watched my personal
digital hell unfold, it struck me that our privacy--mine and yours--has already disappeared, not in one Big
Brotherly blitzkrieg but in Little Brotherly moments, bit by bit.
"Most people would be astounded to know what's out there," says Carole Lane, author of Naked in
Cyberspace: How to Find Personal Information Online. "In a few hours, sitting at my computer,
beginning with no more than your name and address, I can find out what you do for a living, the names
and ages of your spouse and children, what kind of car you drive, the value of your house and how much
taxes you pay on it."
Lane is a member of a new trade: paid Internet searcher, which already has its own professional group,
the Association of Independent Information Professionals. Her career has given her a fresh appreciation
for what's going on. "Real privacy as we've known it," she says, "is fleeting."
Now, there are plenty of things you could do to protect yourself. You could get an unlisted telephone
number, as I was forced to do. You could cut up your credit card and pay cash for everything. You could
rip your E-Z Pass off the windshield and use quarters at tolls. You could refuse to divulge your Social
Security number except for Social Security purposes, which is all that the law requires. You'd be
surprised how often you're asked to provide it by people who have no right to see it.
The real problem, says Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, is that although we say we value
our privacy, what we really want is something very different: "We think that privacy is about
information, but it's not--it's about relationships." The way Kelly sees it, there was no privacy in the
traditional village or small town; everyone knew everyone else's secrets. And that was comfortable. I
knew about you, and you knew about me. "There was a symmetry to the knowledge," he says. "What's
gone out of whack is we don't know who knows about us anymore. Privacy has become asymmetrical."
"A federal privacy agency would be disastrous! The answer to the whole privacy question is more
knowledge," Kelly adds. "More knowledge about who's watching you. More knowledge about the
information that flows between us--particularly the meta information about who knows what and
where it's going."
I'm with Kelly. The only guys who insist on perfect privacy are hermits like the Unabomber. I don't want
to be cut off from the world. I have nothing to hide. I just want some measure of control over what
people know about me. I want to have my magic cookie and eat it too.