After being shown on Fox News, uploaded as cellphone video to YouTube, and then reported on WWL TV, New Orleans, this story's gone viral:
Outrage after TSA pats down 6-year-old at N.O. Airport NEW ORLEANS -- Some civil rights advocates are outraged after a 6-year-old girl received an intense pat-down at Armstrong International Airport security on April 5. ... Someone caught the pat-down on video, and it's making its way around the Internet. ... It has many asking, are the intense security screenings really necessary, especially for a little girl? ... “A child who is visibly, audibly complaining, ‘I don't want to do this,’ should at the very least be given some privacy,” said Marjorie Esman, executive director of the ACLU Louisiana.
This happened in my hometown, but I've been so busy I heard about it on Facebook from Lisa Durden, a New Jersey talk-show host. She said the following:
Hmmm, I conflicted, while I am disturbed that a little girl got a body pat down at the airport, but unfortunately, people have & do stash Contraband & bombs on children. So I was glad to see that it was a female TSA agent who explained to the girl where she was gonna touch her. These are the times we live in so the parents should have prepped her before hand.
Some people interviewed in the news footage had similar opinions. Since the TSA can choose to scan some passengers and physically pat down others, the complaint from parents is that perhaps TSA should be more selective and only scan children, not physically touch them.
In the video at YouTube, you can hear a child complaining, but it's not the little girl who is being searched.
According to this CNN report, your television may be watching you, sort of, through your cable box: what you watch on TV can give advertisers insight into who you are and what you're likely to buy. Armed with the data collected from viewers' cable boxes about their viewing tastes, an advertiser can send commercials to a television screen customized to the interests of viewers in a specific home while they watch shows such as American Idol or Being Human. It's possible that your next door neighbor, who may be watching the same show, will see an ad for the same product or service but the ad he or she sees will be slightly different, will promote features that would appeal more to your neighbor's personality rather than to yours.
Through the data collected from cable boxdes, advertisers are leveraging the same power of targeted marketing they leverage through collecting data based on Internet browsing habits. Should we thank or blame Google for this technology? It's its success online with targeted marketing that may be driving this marketing method. Keep in mind that the companies making money from this say that it also helps consumers by decluttering their ad streams, narrowing commercial appeals to the viewer's interests so that viewers don't see ads for products or services they're unlikely to ever use.
"Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are." That's one of those sayings we hear repeated and consider wise. You could probably come up with any number of similar quotes that suggest we can discern the nature and character of a person by what they say, do, wear, and even who they marry. Common sense right?
But what if the person judging who you are is not looking at you in the real world but the virtual world? Your personal data may have been aggreated by a robot-driven website that seems reliable but is not. Or the researcher for a potential creditor, perhaps, could view via Google and also out of context the snippet of a blog post or a poem you wrote and form an opinion of you that could influence decisions about your future or judgments of your life's work. That could happen, assuming the researcher has poor research skills.
And here's an example used often to strike fear into early Internet adopters: What if that picture of you dancing on the bar in college that you posted years ago, before you understood privacy settings, and have long since deleted is nonetheless visible to potential employers or business partners on a Way Back Machine?
These kinds of considerations may be more troublesome for bloggers and others who've gone full throttle into social media, but even those who are not online have concerns. What if in some public record somewhere, due to a clerk's typo, you are classified as divorced with children, but you've never been married nor do you have a child, and yet, when people search for you in Google or Bing, that part of the record is fourth on first-page results, ressurected by a website using an error-ridden public database?
Some of us might shout then that our privacy's been violated and our lives misreported. Another might say, "not really" because we've brought these spectres to our doors ourselves through our love of network technology. And another might argue less privacy makes the world a safer place.
Technology complicates an old American issue, whether we have the right to privacy. Once upon a time in America expectations of privacy were considered a threat to society; it was illegal for people to live alone; and in a country made up of small villages, any hopes of keeping a secret was deemed a novel idea. I heard this on an episode of House, but nerd that I am, I looked it up, and it's true.
For all our whining today about loss of privacy in the digital age as though privacy is a guaranteed right of American citizenship, the fact is that the right to privacy has often been in jeopardy. Our government's willingness to protect this right has been less than unequivocal, and now, due to computer networking technology, modern humans may be going back to the days of fewer secrets, to live their lives as open books. ... Continue reading at WritingJunkie.net
CNN reports that Gene Cooley has been "awarded $404,000 for libelous internet postings surrounding the death of his fiancee."
The Chicago Sun Times says that shortly after the death of Cooley's fiancée, who was shot to death by her ex-husband, "an anonymous poster hiding behind six user names labeled Cooley, among other things, a pervert and a drug user." He lived in a small town, Blairsville, Ga., and ended up losing his job and having to move 200 miles away to Augusta to be free of the lies about him by a woman who, as it turns out, didn't even know him. ... Read more.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution has a thorough story related to Cooley's ordeal that also examines privacy online. Read it here.
More than likely, any attempt to remove your personal data from Spokeo.com will only result in Spokeo having more information about you.
Everytime I look around on Facebook lately, someone is posting a warning about Spokeo.com, the same website discussed in the video above. Spokeo is a personal information aggregator promoting itself as a search engine with the tagline "not your grandma's phone book." The site is making public in one place people's personal data that is normally considered private, such as your home address and net worth.
The invasion of privacy has people up in arms. My first thought when I noticed the warnings was, "Another annoying site?"
Over the years I've learned there's not much you can do about bits of your life seeping out online short of staying offline and living far below the radar or living off the grid completely. The only people who may be relatively safe are those with common names like "Jane Smith" because it takes so long to figure out which Jane Smith that only someone being paid to find the right one will bother. However, even Dick and Jane can be assured that somebody, somewhere is watching and gathering not only their personal data but also their social and buying behaviors.
Nevertheless, with so many people posting concerns about Spokeo.com, and then last night even one of my local TV stations doing a segment about it, I decided it was time to pay Spokeo a visit. I entered my own name and some friends and family member's names, and I quickly discovered that of the private information Spokeo makes public about ordinary people, some is accurate and some is totally bogus. Either way, the exposure is a problem. Fake information can sometimes cause more problems than factual information.
But seeing an elderly relative or young female relative's actual address show up is disturbing for obvious reasons. I thought about the risk Spokeo and other sites like it may pose for women who are fleeing violent ex spouses or boyfriends when it makes phone numbers and addresses visible to anyone or how easily it would be for a con artist to use the data revealed to perhaps show up at a senior citizen's house and claim to know the senior. Will it take someone being swindled of life savings or killed to run the Spokeos of the Net out of business?
So, I clicked on its opt-out directions to remove my name and one of my children's names. I figured I'd tell friends and other family to go in and take their names out later, but as I thought about trying to remove my self, I decided to let it go. Like Hans Solo, I thought, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
I decided not to opt out because I suspected that the outcome of any attempt to remove myself would be that Spokeo ended up verifying my email address, which it would then post online or sell. Plus, if not Spokeo, then some other database down the road will pop up pimping uch private information again.
Investigators at Snopes.com came to similar conclusions:
"... removing your personal information from display by Internet aggregators isn't a one-time deal, but rather more like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole: You might swat down an aggregator site or two, but more of them will inevitably pop up. ... Our repeated attempts to request the blocking of a particular record through Spokeo's privacy page have found the procedure to be highly questionable: no attempt is made to verify that the person requesting the blocking of a record is the person identified by that record, our efforts have never resulted in a successfully blocked record, and Spokeo's customer service group did not respond to any of our inquiries. ... Attempts to initiate record blocking are frequently met with error messages claiming that the provided e-mail address is invalid or that "in order to prevent abuse, we must limit the frequency of privacy requests." ... All of this has led some to speculate that one of Spokeo's core businesses is actually collecting e-mail addresses or pushing sales of privacy services."
I think Snopes contributors are on to something, especially with that final point of speculation.
In the video at the top of the post, a privacy expert advises that you should be careful about what you put online in the first place. Remember nothing really disappears from the Internet. Somewhere, some database has grabbed it and archived your data for posterity.
Most likely, the government is the only entity that can stop this kind of intrusion by making it illegal for third party sources to make private citizens' information visible to casual Internet surfers without the citizen's explicit permission. I don't think the government can stop these aggregators from selling the information. The junk mail industry has thrived on these kinds of sales for years. But some kind of legislation should be able to stop aggregators from exposing the phone numbers, home addresses, and personal income of people with whom these sites have no direct relationship. Or at least perhaps some kind of privacy legislation can force these sites to reveal the original sources so citizens can have their information hidden at those websites or databases.
Remember the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean nobody's following you"? Well, now, given the many security cameras in stores, RFID tags in clothing, trackers attached to shopping carts, the next time you get that creepy feeling that someone's watching, you'll probably be right.
I watched House tonight on Fox. It's one of my favorite shows. Tonight in the episode "Private Lives," Dr. Gregory House took on a blogger's strange illness, and his team members discussed the Internet and privacy.
The character Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson) said that privacy is a relatively new concept, and added that people used to live in small villages where it was impossible to keep secrets. Later he said that a lack of privacy has its benefits, such as the the individual has a community with which to share problems and get support. He also asserted that people left to themselves tend to make stupid decisions.
Naturally, I researched what he said. It's a thing I do sometimes, check the truth behind assertions made in fictional television programs. For instance, I've written several pieces on the truth behind Lie to Me.
Plus, a light went off in my brain. What he said sounded correct, and the opinion represented in his lines is indeed based on fact. For instance, the Puritans considered it a civic duty to spy on one's neighbors. According to the privacy timeline at Scientific American, "In many towns people (were) forbidden to live alone." You may view the timeline here.
Privacy and whether we can maintain it in our Internet/social media culture is a topic constantly rehashed. For example, Melissa Ford writing at BlogHer.com posted last week, "Please Rob Me and How the Internet Affects Privacy." Her post discusses in part how some home insurance premiums may increase because personal information is available to strangers on places like Twitter and Facebook.
You can watch full episodes of House at Fox and also follow the show on Twitter. It's probably smart for TV dramas and comedies to do shows featuring bloggers or blogging sometimes because some blogger somewhere will talk about it.
The photo in this post comes from Kasa.com with the caption, "House and the team take on the case of Frankie (guest star Laura Prepon, R), an avid blogger who solicits the advice of her followers as she updates them on her condition from her hospital bed."
What's the number one reason people hide their Twitter, Facebook, MySpace pages and sometimes their blogs? Don't answer here. Instead, please take the Secret Agent poll at this link. (Scroll down a tad and look to your left on the sidebar.)
Partially inspired by this CNN article about friending your boss on Facebook, the poll gives you an option of five answers. However, this subject has been on my mind for a while because I went through a period of flying under the radar online after three years of being highly visible. I hid as best I could for multiple reasons and came back for practical and artistic reasons.
I know an attorney who thinks anyone who has a page online for any reason other than attracting clients is an idiot asking for trouble. Perhaps he has Facebook phobia, which is an idea from an article on that subject at ThePhoenix.com. The Robert Ullman drawing featured here comes from that piece.
The polls answer choices are pretty light. If you want to say more on this subject, then add a comment to this post please.
