The rise of Big Brother has long been a topic of discussion here. We have talked about cameras in the classroom, the FamilyMap service and the potential use of Google Earth by terrorists and all manners of surveillance and invasions of privacy in between.
However how diligent are we when taking action to guard our own privacy?
This morning, I posted a support query in the deep and authentic WordPress.com Support Forum concerning previous discussions of the “Quantcast Pixel” that is loaded for each WordPress.com blog. It seems that if you visit the Quantcast site, anyone can get information on your WordPress.com blog just by entering your blog name at the end of the Quantcast URL. Here’s the text of my support inquiry — I have added the screenshots for this article:
On December 22, 2009, I wrote — The Whiteness of Technology — and how HP were discriminating against certain racial features.
We are a nation of masks — we repress our true feelings and protect our basic being. On the surface, we claim we are all equal and that skin color doesn’t matter and that technology is agnostic, non-atavistic, non-discriminatory and non-evangelistic. Today, we have been forced to know better by peeking out from behind our masks to divine the reality before us.
I am always confounded by Facebook. The social service is always changing things behind the scenes. Nothing I look for a second time is ever found in the same place. I wonder if that’s done by design or sheer arrogance?
My latest confoundidery happened last week when I discovered, for some reason, I had over 5,505 friends! You can see in today’s screenshot of my Facebook page that number has dipped to 5,501 — I lose and gain friends all day long in bunches of threes and fours for reasons I have not yet been able to divine — and I have no idea how I was able to leap over the infamous and mean Facebook 5,000 friend barrier because I haven’t actively made any friends requests in over a year.
After a successful return to WordPress.com from WordPress Multisite, I began rooting around the Settings and Tools and Appearance areas for my WordPress.com account to discover any new joys that were added during my inattention.
I found I could now add my “Google Profile” as a “verified” external service via Gravatar. I clicked to continue to complete the verification process for my “Public Profile.”
Our beloved and respected Eben Moglen is back in the news this week. We met Eban a year ago during his FreedomBox days:
SuperGenius Eben Moglen wants free and unfettered access to the internet and he’s putting his money where his mind is by creating the “FreedomBox” — a device that plugs into the wall and gives you unfettered and unrestricted access to the internet — to help make certain that a government cannot disconnect its people from communicating with the rest of the world during a perceived crisis.
Did you know your Facebook privacy has been leaking? As that social network expands to flow like a never-ending molasses across the grimacing façade of the nameless masses — suffocating us in pokes and Mafia War requests — we need to pause a moment and step back to wonder just what’s happening to us beyond the velvet curtain.
The recent, leaping, suicide death of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi from the edge of the George Washington Bridge reads like “Lori Drew: Part II” in so many sad ways. Two Rutgers students are charged with “invasion of privacy” because they secretly streamed live internet video of Tyler making out with a guy in his dorm room.
I remember when I was a child reading how actor Sean Penn had attacked a photographer at his wedding. It was big news in the day and it was news that seemed to repeat itself every time a photographer got a little too close for Penn’s comfort. Just last October, he attacked a photographer and broke his camera. Now there is a report that American Idol contestant Adam “Glambert” Lambert got enraged when a photographer was, so to speak, doing his job — and he attacked the photographer.
We know we are being watched. We accept we are being recorded. We’ve even learned to recognize the multiplicity of cameras that bludgeon our every move now and forevermore. There are cameras in the lampposts. There are recording devices in the coffee cups. The eyes of a peacock’s tail — as it struts along fallow land in the wilds of the Bronx and the niches of Central Park — have become a thousand, Panopticonic, eyes perceiving our every move.
Last weekend, my mother held a reception in honor of my having gotten married. A little before the reception actually started, a good friend of my mother took what seemed like a thousand pictures of my wife and me with various other people who were there: My parents, my stepparents, my second cousin, and of course just the two of us — in countless configurations. Everything was posed as he told us where to stand and where to look and, in some cases, what to do with our arms. In contrast, the Tate Modern is now featuring an exhibit called Exposed, which is entirely filled with photographs that were taken without the subjects being aware of it at the time.
We know we are being watched and recorded — even while stuck in traffic — but few of us realize the depth of the “fingerprint data” mining going on behind us behind the scenes to wholly identify the minutiae of us. Over the weekend, another “Blippy Blooper” made the headlines, and the willful Blippy braggarts around us continue to get publicly stung by the very money viper they’re trying to privately pet.
Every single day someone somewhere is violating your email privacy. The violators might not even intend on penetrating your cone of silence, but their carelessness can lead to no other end than virtually bleeding you out. You might think your email address is secure, but if someone has access to your private information and then includes those personal markers in a misdirected email intended for you, but sent to someone else — any sense of security you have worked to protect is inherently broken.
Tom Casady is currently the Chief of Police for Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child of Lincoln, I enjoy reading his fantastic blog called, “The Chief’s Corner.” I was recently alarmed when I read an article written by Tom that rehashed the offensive/silly/inappropriate email usernames people use to inquire about employment with the Lincoln Police Department. I was shocked to see the email usernames of applicants revealed in public on Tom’s blog because that is in the least a violation of privacy for those making an inquiry, and perhaps, even a more serious ethical violation of a vested public city official. I was unable to find the recent article that shocked me, but doing a search on Tom’s site led me to a dead link for this page written on December 2, 2008 where Tom Casady revealed live email usernames of the inquirers — figuring our the entire email address is not that hard and often doing a Google search on a unique username alone can reveal a lot. I have blurred the email addresses contained in that article:
