Online privacy: Big Brother
caught with his pants down
Analysis/Commentary
A report released by the Governmental Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate
last Monday reveals that the U.S. government breaks its own rules on
collecting consumer information over the Net. Chairman Fred Thompson,
Republican from Tennessee, said that 64 agency Websites were found to
collect cookies in defiance of restrictions imposed against such monitoring
and tracking.
This admission represents an odd case of the government issuing a
confession of ethical misconduct. Government policy on the Internet has aimed
at remaining as honest and as transparent as possible. Obviously, however,
agency heads have not been vigilant in policing their programmers or have
taken a lazy approach to the privacy issue. The Departments of Education,
Treasury, Energy, Interior, Transportation, as well as NASA, the General
Services Administration, and the U.S. Mint are among the agencies found
tracking visitors.
Collecting private information remains an attraction for both government
and commerce alike. Managers of Websites want to know as much about users as
possible, in the perhaps mistaken belief that they can read their minds and
influence their conduct. And they usually don't want consumers to know that
they are looking in. Hence the soft approach to self-regulation.
To date, commercial sites have responded to consumer privacy demands by
posting ambiguous privacy policies and by appointing corporate privacy
officers. Privacy tends to represent a marketable virtue, rather than a
reality. Tougher approaches -- hardly ever used -- include measures identified
as "notice, choice, access, and integrity."
Notice requires notice to users that the Website collects
information; choice, that they know that they have a choice to refuse;
access, that they have access to verifying the kind and quantity of
information collected; and integrity, that they know that personal
information will be protected. According to former FTC Chairman Pitofsky, only
20 percent of data-collecting Websites offer tough measures to ensure privacy.
Another solution to ensuring privacy might be the same as avoiding
censorship. Two Internet research groups -- Publius and Freenet -- have begun
to use distributed computing to ensure both privacy and security: the new
peer-to-peer networks serve as alternatives to Web hosting on centralized
servers. Publius and Freenet employ a network of volunteers equipped with
software to encrypt and distribute "content" -- store complete Websites or
documents, such as .pdf files and images.
The creators of the new peer-to-peer networks say that the best secrecy
lies in total secrecy -- since in their model, only the reader and author know
what sits on a distributed network at a given time. Files are broken up,
encrypted, and positioned at random. Placement and downloading of content is
equally anonymous. Ideally, the new hosting and delivery networks might harbor
endangered files, such as those entrusted by dissidents or whistle blowers,
but they could serve to protect commercial interests by foiling
denial-of-service attacks and Website hacking. April 18, 2001
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