Joel Tucker | Web Communicator | 561/845-5417
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All the Web's a Stage Privacy on the Internet? Forget it. Your every move is on record.
I am not the Joel Tucker who sells leather goods on the World Wide Web, but I am one of more than 20 Joel Tuckers who are traceable on the Internet. Entrepreneurs are stringing our names, addresses and telephone numbers across the wires for all to see. They don't need our permission; all they need is a telephone directory. Once, we were hidden in tiny type, just another name in a thousand pages of names. Now, we can be singled out quickly, and with very few keystrokes.
What many people don't know is that everything that crosses the web -- the filename and origin of everything you see -- is logged by a computer. Your service provider sees or can see your name and the names of all the files you are reading. Elsewhere, the computer that serves those files has a record of the computer that requests them.
"Those files" are the web pages you view and the graphic files they display.
And then there are cookies, those little bits of code that web page publishers can plant on your computer itself. That way, if you come back later under a different name or via a different service provider, they can still recognize you and tailor the presentation accordingly.
The Internet was designed to share information, not to restrict it. Part of the deal in getting all this stuff "for free" is that in some sense, you identify yourself. Otherwise, the serving computer doesn't know where to "send" the information in the first place.
It's educational to sit with a network administrator and watch his firewall monitor. Line after line of information clicks by. The information is recorded in case the administrator needs it for troubleshooting later on. Imagine the potential for abuse if someone used that information not for troubleshooting, but for troublemaking, marketing or manipulation.
But I'm just a few digits in a trillion lines of code, right? Right -- and just one line among millions in just one of a million of telephone books.
Clearly, many and perhaps most Internet users are oblivious to this record. The transaction is so easy, they think it's totally anonymous. But more than one employee has had an ice-water wake-up call from the company's service administrator when their Asian Babes photo browse gets in the way of technical data.
Network administrators are for the most part supergeeks -- and proud to wear the label. How many gigabytes can we store? How fast can we retrieve it? How many ways can we sort it? Most of these professionals are harmless, even benevolent, but they aren't your shrink or your lawyer. The laws governing their use of that data, or the government's right to access that data, are murky at best. Clearly, in most cases, the information is NOT protected.
So if you're tempted to surf on the wild side of the web, consider the paperless data trail you leave behind, and measure well the words of Christ: "There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed."
And if you're a network administrator, do us all a favor; erase those files before Yahoo builds that character trait search engine.
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