ARTS & FARCES internet

Web bugs pose a threat to privacy that’s even more insidious than cookies. A web bug is a small graphic image—usually a single pixel—that is embedded within a web page or email message and used specifically to monitor the actions of the reader of the carrier material. The web bug is capable of carrying quite a bit of useful information back to its originator, including:

• The IP address of the computer that accessed the material containing the web bug
• The URL of the page on which the web bug is embedded
• The date and time that the material containing the web bug was accessed
• The type of browser used to access the material containing the web bug
• The operating system used to access the material containing the web bug
• Any previously set cookie value

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If consumers don’t completely get it, the government hasn’t a clue. The Federal Trade Commission decided it would be a good idea to make businesses provide an “opt-out” mechanism for the commercial collection of personal information online. It should come as no surprise that the approved self-regulation plan was submitted by the Network Advertising Initiative, a consortium of Internet advertising companies.

Cookies can only communicate between your computer and the website on which the cookie originated. Advertising networks like DoubleClick are able to aggregate user information because their cookies originate on most any large-company website that carries advertising. When I point my browser at WebMD.com to research end-stage renal disease, DoubleClick sets a cookie on my computer (assuming I’m dumb enough to configure my browser to accept cookies). Then, a day later, when I point my browser at my insurance company who also carries ads from the DoubleClick network, DoubleClick is able to put together that someone researching end-stage renal disease is insured by the insurance company. Further, DoubleClick would be able to identify me if any of the websites to which I have provided personal information also participate in the DoubleClick network. Think about that for a minute. Then ponder the ramifications of DoubleClick’s Abacus Alliance program, in which the company intends to merge its personally identifiable online data with its enormous offline database that contains records on some 80 million U.S. households. According to DoubleClick’s privacy policy, the merged database will contain an alarming level of personal information detail including each user’s “name, address, retail, catalog and online purchase histories, and demographic data.”

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Americans, no matter how much carpetbagging corporations don’t want to hear it, care about their personal privacy. Surprisingly, they do little to protect it. In fact, Americans are willing to give most websites information they claim they want to keep private.

America is nothing if not a cauldron of contradictions.

But these contradictions are likely a result of most Internet users not understanding the mechanics of how, exactly, the Internet works. While we want control over our personal information, we don’t know enough about how the technology works to assert that control.

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Last month it became apparent that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has an advanced Internet communications monitoring system called Carnivore. The software system, when placed on an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) computers, scans all email, web browsing, newsgroup posting, etc. for a specified target. In short, all of a suspect’s electronic communications are surveilled. While Justice Department officials insist that Carnivore can only be used on targets under a court order, civil liberties experts warn that Carnivore is simply too easy to use for illegal surveillance. FBI officials have stated that the agency has about 20 Carnivore computers on hand and that the system has been used in fewer than 100 investigations since its introduction in 1999. So far this year, the system has been used in 16 cases, six criminal investigations and 10 incidents involving national security. The FBI has not, however, disclosed how many individual wiretaps were conducted in relation to each case.

Even some government officials are concerned about Carnivore. “It’s the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody’s phone calls to see if it’s the phone call you should be monitoring,” former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch told the Wall Street Journal. “You develop a tremendous amount of information.” Representative Bob Barr (R-GA) described Carnivore as “frightening.”

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Sociologists have known for almost 100 years that we’re often more comfortable confiding in strangers than in people we know. Strangers remain strangers and there is no associated baggage of embarrassment in revealing information to them. The question raised by the Internet is whether the latest communications medium is a stranger or not. Most of us are justifiably disturbed when we learn that our online (and offline) activities are tied to our true identities through permanent databases, if only because we know that those databases can be bought and subpoenaed.

Technology has always threatened privacy. One hundred years ago, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren were concerned that instant photography and faster printing presses—the new media of that age—would diminish personal privacy. “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery,” they wrote in the Harvard Law Review. Each iteration of technology greatly expands the aspects of formerly-private life that can be monitored, indexed, and archived. The fear is that these recorded aspects of our selves will come to be perceived as the totality of who we are.

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