I’m not sure that I agree with the level of paranoia exhibited, but Alternet has a nice article that helps explain why some folks are upset over news about the extent to which data mining is or can be used as a surveillance tool:
Supposedly the privacy of Europeans will be protected because the directive doesn’t require companies to save the content of what people are saying — only whom they talked with, as well as when and where they did it. So if I’m in England, and I call some guy in Germany, my cell provider keeps a record that says I talked to Grosse Eier from London at 2:45 p.m., but it has no idea what we said to each other. But if Eier happens to be convicted of a computer crime, the mere fact that I spoke to him could be used as evidence and a rationale for searching my own computers — or my house.
As if that weren’t creepy enough, it’s very hard to separate content from other stuff when you’re online. In Europe your local ISP would probably keep a record of “where you go” by saving the URLs of the sites you visit. But a URL can obviously reveal a lot about the content of what you’re doing. When you do a Google search, for instance, your search terms will appear in the URL that presents the search results to you. So the ISP won’t just see that you’re visiting Google; it will also see that you visited Google to learn more about “subversive Polish political propaganda.” Think the Polish authorities are going to look kindly on that when they find it in 10 years? No, I don’t think so either.
Thought-provoking stuff, and it helps shed a light on why I’m torn on the subject.
On the one hand, there shouldn’t be any problem with using information that is publicly or semi-publicly available already today. That new tools are being developed to derive increasing amounts of meaning from disparate pieces of data is an interesting development, but one that isn’t necessarily bad. Besides, if you’re not doing anything illegal, what should you be concerned about hiding?
On the other hand…the article points out how this sort of information could be misused or give rise to headaches that normal people shouldn’t have to deal with.
