You have no privacy, now move along

IT'S SAD when I have to agree with Scott " McNealy, but let's face it, you have no privacy. It's time to get over it and move along.

You can't pick up the newspaper or crank open your favorite general news website without another story about how a leading corporation or a major government agency has announced that they have lost various financial bits of their customers, typically due to some sort of sloppy data handling or breech of security. Typically penalties for a faux pas of this sort includes, oh, a tongue-lashing in front of an elected official and violated parties get a year or two of free credit report monitoring. Doesn't really say what you might do if your identity is stolen in year three or four based upon that data.

Also some interesting liability problems if your financial data has been lost by multiple third parties - U.S. armed forces vets have a head start on the rest of us in this category due to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Some poor chap getting shot at during the 1993 Gulf War could find that his identity has been "lost" by both his government and his credit card company. Care to guess what the credit card company is going to say if there's a claim filed against it?

Unfortunately, we're at the tip of the iceberg here. It's going to take a couple of years and at least one highly expensive incident - for the company involved and its customers -before corporations start really locking down their data in a secure fashion in a way that keeps their employees from simply loading it on a USB key or the iPod for a couple of hours of work on the weekend.

People shouldn't be worried about the most recent data disclosers, but the ones yet to come. It doesn't take a genius to realise that the best way to find "lost" data is to start buying up expensive laptops that appear at shady pawnshops; preferably ones that look like they've had "Property of US Government" stickers recently peeled off of them. The local branch of organised crime is likely already developing their own methods of data mining that involve buying stolen computers in bulk, stripping out the hard drives, and scanning them for data. It's the new-wave electronic "chop shop" except that today's civil-minded criminals can simply scan and copy the hard drives onto their Interweb-ordered multi-TB servers before shipping off the gear to a third-world country as a "tax donation."

Even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is up against this new free-flowing electronic world, with some not-so-deep cover agents being outed by digging around on the Internet. Smaller countries complain that Google is posting their most classified sites using satellite photography, larger countries are using it to track down and cross-reference facts about visitors to their country.

Even after security tightens up to prevent the loss of financial data, there's still the uncomfortable fact that the governments of the world have become more aggressive in their use of data collection and analysis to track down the bad guys. And there seems to be little momentum to elect new governments with stronger privacy values this year. µ