Privacy

I woke up this morning with two prominent thoughts in my head; one of which I will share now, the other of which you will have to read about in my next blog.

Perhaps the biggest threat in the information age is the right to privacy: the ability to keep my information to myself and not have it misappropriated for someone else's financial gain. I'm not talking about identity theft, although this is a prevalent problem. I'm talking about cognitive theft, using text translations of my thoughts without my permission.

For instance, I did a search on eBay for biometric locks three weeks ago and was quite impresses with a particular finger print security system. I did not buy the item but chose to "watch" it. The next few times I logged into eBay they displayed prominent photos of similar lock product listings on their homepage. Is everyone that interested in biometric locks? No, this display was custom made so me. I also did a search on google and yahoo. I don't usually use yahoo but every once in a while I like to see if I get different results. Well, I have a yahoo mail account. Wouldn't you know that when I signed into my email, not only did I have messages from eBay about fantastic new lock listings I should check out, but the ads on my free yahoo account were also of biometric locks...

Sure, you might say this is just smart marketing, but how far does this information go? When information is bought, sold, and compiled into profiles, what all does someone know about me? Data bases can be rather extensive if keep over a period of years, so there's no telling what all I have inquired about or arbitrarily shared about myself over the years. And who is buying this information?

Certain information must be keep private by federal order as with HIPAA and other laws. But what if this information was not from an official source? What if this information was just a compilation of data collected by various marketing sources and could not be officially tied to any breach of confidence? Could insurance companies then buy this information and use it to deny people coverage based on their user profiles?

Where does the need for information end and the need for privacy begin? Can this even be regulated? If the internet is one big source of information that ties us all together in a thread of searches and quasi-private statements, can we really stop anyone for intelligently compiling this information against us?