Privacy 2.0 - The price of knowing everything

     In recent years the media has given a lot of attention to the pitfalls of mass data collection of Americans and even though it has exploded with the emergence of new channels and technological advances, private companies have been compiling data on our society for decades. Since the dawn of the electronic age, information about our interactions within society have been recorded. Items such as billing paying, significant purchases, biographical information and seemingly meaningless data that could paint detailed sketch of any American's existence. The difference in today's society is the sketch has morphed into a 3-dimensional virtual reality clone. Whether you choose to accept data mining and giving up any false sense of security you may have, depends on if the information gathered about the rest of America has become personally important to you.
      It is too late to late to be dated by my posts so I would like to describe a time when such compiled information had a direct impact on my life. I grew up without my biological father around. He left just after I was born and only being able to hear one side of the story, I always longed for some way to discover the truth. Well a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away the internet was an infant and the only avenue for normal Americans to access it was through a dial-up connection and a single web browser application delivered free to everyone's mailbox by AOL. Although extremely slow, it offered several categories of database information that could be searched with ease. It was mostly for entertainment, or shopping, but a single category became very useful in finding information about my long lost father. It was called People Finder, an expansion of the old white pages model the phone company had already used for decades. This went a step further and gave users the ability to match people with their known age, full documented names and known geographical locations based on bills paid to government services. It was a noisy, squeaky connection, but suddenly it was remarkably unchallenging to locate any person in the nation with a few data points and a little persistence. Within hours I was able to end an 18 year long search for answers and finally hear the other side of story. We never became close, but at least I had my answers.
     Fast forward 15 years, and once again I had a personal need to seek out my biological father. I had  become a parent and my son was curious about his heritage and  I thought it might be a good idea to track down "grandpa" again. This search took only seconds using a online website called Spokeo.com. It is hauntingly disturbing how much this company has compiled on basically anyone that has every interacted with society in any small way. Bills you have paid, known associates and finally members, every address you have ever paid a bill at , every employer or business deal recorded and most recently, the addition of Google street view photos and interactive maps to your most recent residence. A whole new era of digital stalking has suddenly given me the ability to basically look inside his living room window in Clearwater, Florida and all from my cell. Even though he is not a member of Facebook, Twitter, or any of the current media platforms, he has still been tracked for decades, and thankfully, I was able to get closure because of it.

    Complete privacy may sound like a like a great idea, but it is an impossible goal to achieve in a technological society and only works so long as you don't need access to information on anyone else or want to be a member of our social universe. There is hardly a place left on earth you can truly go off grid and live data point free as long as any need to connect exists. I read an article recently that said even Mark Zuckerberg takes steps to control his privacy. Apparently, he takes the simply act of putting tape over his laptop webcam to help mitigate the threat of hackers attempting to gain visual access his keystrokes or personal life, I would have thought one of the most powerful members of  the digital universe would be impervious to any privacy concerns with an army of employees to invent any digital protections he could fathom. However, as evidenced by the recent hacking of his personal Twitter account, not a single person using the web can live in an unbreakable bubble of security. All we can do is limit the amount of information flow. The moment we choose to connect and be a part of our digital culture, we sacrifice our rights to prevent any information redirect.