TSC Trusted Advisors’ Blog

Privacy Experts Miss the Mark

Sometimes it’s fun to listen to people speak about things that they obviously know nothing about. Yesterday I was trapped in my car and listening to NPR. I like the News Report with Jim Lehrer because they usually have very intelligent people speaking about subjects that they know a great deal about. However, today didn’t seem to be one of those occasions.

The topic of discussion was circling around Internet privacy and how there should be laws controlling what information search engine companies can collect about people. How much of our digital DNA can search engines keep?  (You can read the transcript here http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec08/webrights_07-09.html) It followed a piece on how the telecom companies had just gotten immunity for their law breaking acts of government sanctioned spying.

The entire focus of the chat between these two “experts” was the search engine companies themselves and how they are collecting all this information that can be used against consumers. At one point, someone said that it was good that the advertising was being focused so you didn’t get a lot of advertising spam! That’s when my head exploded.

The two “experts” talked about how the information being collected would only be used for the purposes of advertizing and that it wouldn’t be abused or shared. They had obviously missed the previous piece about the telecom companies getting immunity for their illegal information sharing practices. They also missed the news that Google has been ordered to turn over their search logs to Viacom. (Viacom also promised to keep them secret….)

What these folks didn’t talk about was users and how they’re responsible for much of the information that’s leaked onto the Internet. Nowhere in their talk did they say anything about cookie management or browser security. Nowhere was anonymous browsing mentioned! They didn’t even talk about how users can test their browsers for security. All they talked about was more legislation.

We need to provide some leadership and educate people about how their browsers should be configured to ensure personal security of our digital DNA before these “experts” rush off to more bad legislation. Testing is a very good thing because it tells you exactly where you stand and just how secure you are. More “experts” should be talking about it.