[Infowarrior] - As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

Mon Feb 16 21:10:11 UTC 2009

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

NOAM COHEN

Published: Monday, February 16, 2009 at 5:24 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, February 16, 2009 at 5:24 a.m.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090216/ZNYT05/902163009/2193/SPORTS?Title=As_Data_Collecting_Grows__Privacy_Erodes

THERE are plenty of people who can muster outrage at Alex Rodriguez,  
the Yankees third baseman who is the latest example of win-at-any-cost  
athletes. But I’d prefer to see him as at the cutting edge of another  
scourge — the growing encroachment on privacy.

The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public  
followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party  
data collection. We are typically told that personal information is  
anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like  
making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or  
speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is  
then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and  
potentially life-changing.

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid  
use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed.  
Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to  
determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the  
samples were then to be destroyed.

It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as  
“anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr.  
Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had  
insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of  
a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous”  
samples suddenly had clear labels on them.

As a friend put it in an e-mail message: “Privacy is serious. It is  
serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is  
released.”

•

To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard, there is  
an obvious explanation for this kind of repurposing of information —  
there is so much information out there. Supply creates demand, he  
argues.

“This is a broader truth about the law,” he writes in an e-mail  
message. “There are often no requirements to keep records, but if  
they’re kept, they’re fair game for a subpoena.”

And we are presented with what Professor Zittrain calls the “deadbeat  
dad” problem. There are government investigators, divorcing spouses,  
even journalists, who have found creative ways to exploit the  
material. “So many databases,” he writes, “as simple as highway toll  
collection records or postal service address changes, lend themselves  
to other uses, such as finding parents behind on their child support  
payments.”

Perhaps a more direct explanation is that data collection is part of  
what Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier  
Foundation, calls “the surveillance business model.” That is, there is  
money to be made from knowing your customers well — with a depth  
unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track  
obsessively online behavior.

“We took whatever was done offline and put it on steroids,” she said,  
perhaps with the Rodriguez case in the back of her mind. “It requires  
compliance with the kind of promises that comes with this kind of data  
collection.”

The foundation argues that online service providers — social networks,  
search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what  
they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball  
players’ union is now facing. The union is being criticized for  
failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy  
the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them.  
“You don’t want to know that stuff,” she says, speaking of the  
ordinary blogger collecting data on every commenter. “You don’t want  
to get a subpoena. For ordinary Web sites it is a cost to collect all  
this data.”

The digital format makes it easy to cling to material that normally  
would be disposed of or would disintegrate. Storage is cheap and  
practically limitless. And Ms. Cohn says of the people who dominate  
the Internet, “the people who design software, in my experience, tend  
to be pack rats.”

Journalists are sometimes advised to destroy their notes every few  
months so that they can’t be used in a lawsuit. Yet, somehow you want  
those notes — you see only how they could set you free, or lead you  
back to a new story, not prove your guilt.

Even though Google is most frequently viewed as the most worrisome  
collector of personal data — the mail you send, the documents you  
write, the books you read — Ms. Cohn said, “I have a higher confidence  
that Google will do what it says — because Google has lots of people  
watching them — than other, smaller sites.”

As a legal director, she focuses on holding organizations responsible  
for their promises to customers. The foundation is suing AT&T for  
cooperating with the government’s surveillance of telephone calls —  
“they broke their promises to their customers — ‘we are going to route  
your phone calls, not be an agent of the state.’ ”

In an online opinion column for The New York Times, Doug Glanville, a  
former teammate of Mr. Rodriguez who was part of the steroid survey,  
begins by writing that “there was one clear moment when I wanted to be  
treated like a number.” It was, he said, “the day in 2003 that I went  
in for a drug test as a member of the Texas Rangers.”

I’m here to tell him that being treated as a number may be cruel  
comfort. On the Internet, he can be tracked by investigators quite  
content to think of him as a number: they call it his IP address.