… Which brings us back to Google and their unilateral use of subscribers’ Gmail address lists to pre-populate potential subscribers’ social contacts on Google’s new social networking offering Buzz. No permission to do so was requested or given.
This incident actually raises a very interesting question, namely: “What information about yourself should you own and be able to control?” Having been heavily involved in privacy issues in the financial services industry in the U.S. and Europe, I have been through many lists of defined personal data. You know the standard ones … date of birth, Social Security number, credit card and bank account numbers, etc., etc., in various combinations. But do these definitions actually represent the full scope of personal information? In my opinion, they don’t.
This was brought home to me at an excellent meeting of the New York Metro Chapter of the ISSA (Information Systems Security Association), held on February 17, 2010. The topic for the meeting was “Shifts in the CISO’s Domain – Authenticity, Admissibility, and the Future of Forensics.” One particular presentation by Jonathan Nystrom of Cataphora, on “Converting Data into Meaningful Information,” raised some privacy flags. He described how his firm is able to collect all manner of data about individuals’ behavior within computer systems and networks. They then analyze the data to demonstrate behavioral patterns, from which they infer various normal and criminal activities. My first reaction was … Does this type of analysis infringe upon a person’s privacy? As I am not a lawyer, I cannot begin to answer such a question … only to give an opinion. In my view, data relating one’s personal use of computer systems and networks should indeed be classified as personal information, just as are Social Security number, date of birth and the like. In fact, such activity-based information should have to meet a higher standard of protection and use since there is the additional possibility of error and misinterpretation. For example, what about an actual Mario Bartiromo? If he exists, his whole Web presence will possibly be completely contaminated by the typo.
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