I Spy…
There has been a moment in every Internet voyager’s life, where you have asked yourself, ‘I wonder what the Internet has to say about me’. We have all done it, sheepishly looked around to make sure no one is watching and typed our name into Google, waiting on the edge of our seats until we realize the only thing that is published on the Internet about us is our name on the ninth grade honor roll. There is even a new play called I Google Myself that deals with this very phenomenon. And while the play appears to be a manufactured drama about a man trying to find the meaning of life through an Internet search, it reflects a very human instinct—the instinct to locate ourselves in the ever burgeoning world of new media and technology, to question how we fit into the ever expanding web of knowledge and information that is available to us. But as our access to this web grows, we cannot help but ask the question, is there any privacy in the world of the Internet?
Based upon the growing number of social networking sites, it appears that privacy is the last thing that Internet users want—this is an age where you can search for your ex-girlfriend on Facebook, or look up your blind date for Wednesday night on Myspace or read your neighbors Blog posting. And it is exactly this voyeuristic desire that has lead to a new spawn of information data bases, like Stalkerati a website that searches all social networking sites and creates a profile of the person being searched. That’s right… it is the ultimate Internet stalking site. While the appearance of this type of database may seem alarming and invasive, is going to one site to do “Internet stalking” any different then spending time searching up old friends and foes on Facebook and Myspace? The site boasts itself as “a little hack” put together in two hours in order to eliminate going to various networks in order to track someone down, however it somehow feels much more invasive and foreboding…especially because the creator uses the world “cyberstalk” to describe his vision.
It is one thing to sign up for a service that allows you to create a profile, and quite another to be subject to random searches from a third-party source—but where is the line drawn? And do we as Internet users who voluntarily sign up for networking sites have a right to police this type of activity?
This type of access to information however, does not stop or even start with “little hack” sites like Stalkerati, it extends to the big bad wolf of search engines, Google. And even sites like Google do not eschew our privacy anxieties. Recently some 27 countries from the European Union have launched an investigation on exactly how Google stores its user information. And this concern is not unfounded. Google surveys and stores the words visitors’ type into its site, and also tracks surfing behavior between websites searched. And while this is different then providing personal information it comes dangerously close to painting an intimate picture of the user. This lack of Internet privacy is not just alarming because any hacking capable stranger can find information about our favorite websites, movies, or personal photos, but because as The Wall Street Journal notes, this access to information does not stop there. In a recent article about Internet privacy Jason Fry, assistant managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Online and fellow Blogger writes,
“Property deeds, marriage and divorce records, court files, motor-vehicle information and tax documents are increasingly being digitized, and contain a wealth of information that few of us would want online: Social Security numbers, birth dates, maiden names and images of our signatures. Local governments have rushed to put those documents online for a decade or so, often without scrubbing them of such information. And that’s made them potentially fertile ground for busybodies, stalkers and identity thieves. ”
It is for these very personal reasons, that the increasing access to information from the smallest scale of sites like Stalkerati, to the conglomerates like Google, is alarming. Because how do you selectively control information that is all just out there, in the great unknown abyss of the Internet? As the network of social media grows, and we excitedly gather a greater level of knowledge and social connectedness, we are also charting a new territory—a territory ripe with questions of where our desire for unlimited access ends and where our personal privacy begins. This is just something to ask yourself the next time you do a little Internet spying.