Look It Up On The Net

By Don Rittner

Are you sitting? You might want to while you read this column, especially if you’re the kind of person who values your privacy above all else. The following information may scare the bytes out of you.

There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. So don’t post anything on the Net you don’t want your mother or the FBI to know about. Sure, you can encrypt your email between friends and business associates. But, if you participate in any form of public discussion, or leave your email address on a Web site, participate in a survey, or fill out a credit application, you can bet it will end up in some online database. You see, almost everything is archived and stored somewhere on the Net. Digital information doesn’t take up as much room as paper and it’s easy to store and massage. In reality, this digital stuff is just recycled electrons.

Have you noticed advertising banners pop up promoting some product or range of products you might be interested in when you visit certain Web sites? One of the latest methods of online marketing is targeting individual tastes. A company can add a ‘tracker bit’ to your email address and follow you around the Web keeping track of the kinds of sites you visit and types of advertising banners you might actually look at. Imagine any company can make sure you see THEIR banner or offer everywhere you go on the Net! Shades of Big Brother!

Let’s take a look at some examples on how easy it is to get personal information. You’re walking down Fourth Street and pick up a piece of paper that has a phone number on it: 272-7232. No name, only the number. Simply surf over to AnyWho’s Reverse Phone lookup (http://www.anywho.com/telq.html) and type in the number and the area code (518).

AnyWho informs you it’s the number for the Rensselaer County Historical Society at 57 Second Street. A click on another button will give a detailed map of the surrounding area with the Society marked clearly, which you can print out. If you found this number in Schenectady or elsewhere, and wanted to visit the Historical Society, the site will print out a detailed driving plan. It includes step by step driving directions, how far it is in miles, and how long it will take to get there.

From my house in Schenectady, it ‘s 22.4 miles to the Society, and it will take me 40 minutes and 20 turns (fastest route) to get there.

The site also has a similar service if you found just an address and no name. You can look up the address and see whom it belongs to and even find the names and addresses of the nearest neighbors!

If you found the piece of paper with the phone number while on vacation, but weren’t sure of the area code of where you were, simply surf over to the area code lookup at 555-1212.com

(http://www.555-1212.com/area_codes.html), and type in the name of the city. Up pops the area code.

You can also look up someone’s zip code (http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/) or email address (http://people.yahoo.com/) if they have one.

Many online users don’t realize that when they participate in online chats, forum discussions, or join a mailing list, the information is readily available to anyone who wants it. Many online marketers go to chat rooms and grab the email addresses of the participants (or use "bots," automated software to do it) so they can send you junk mail, better known as SPAM. America Online’s chat rooms are breeding grounds for those folks.

Usenet, the public chat line of the Net moves millions of messages a day about any and every subject imaginable. DejaNews (www.dejanews.com) is a searchable database that archives EVERY Usenet posting. Not only can you keyword search on any topic and get a list of current postings (or archived ones), but you can also get a user profile of anyone that has posted. The profile gives you the number of unique postings made by the person and to which newsgroups they were posted. You can also read every posting.

In effect, you can get a good idea of the political or social leanings of an individual by profiling. You can bet the FBI is constantly using this profiling technique. The government also has "sniffer" programs that go out to Net servers and look for certain words like "kill" or "Clinton" in the same stream of bits and then track them back to the source. Ask the students at Philips Exeter Academy that were investigated by the Secret Service a few years ago for doing just that. Be careful how you rant and rave online.

Read Dan Brown’s excellent book, Digital Fortress (1998, St Martins Press. ISBN: 031218087X) to learn more about this. Profiling is nothing new. The government has been doing it for years.

Before you get too paranoid, there are many legitimate uses of this information. If you were just trying to find a lost relative in Rome, or doing a bit of geneological research, you could visit "Telephone Directories of the World" (http://www.teldir.com/). They have hundreds of telephone directories and millions of names from every continent in the world. The online map programs are great for planning vacations and trips. I use the online yellow pages all the time. I have no intention of paying a buck to Bell Atlantic for directory service. The zip code and area code finders are great tools as well.

Information on the Net is like a piece of art hanging in the Guggenheim. Its value is determined by how the information is processed by the receiver.

Before you post anything publicly, ask yourself how you will feel if it pops back up in some strange place a year from now.

The bottom line is if you plan on overthrowing the world, don’t use the Net to plan or discuss it! Big brother and the rest of us are watching.

 

Don’s new book, The iMac Book (Coriolis Group) is in the bookstores. He also owns The Learning Factory in Albany. Reach him at drittner@aol.com.