In case you haven’t noticed… there isn’t any anymore.
Everyone in the industrialized world is under constant surveillance. Every telephone call we make can be recorded, every email we write and all the websites we visit are stored for later processing.
With the growth of the social network hype more and more information on people is given away willingly. You only have to connect all the information from these networks and other traces on the net to build a very detailed profile of someone. You and me included.
Time for a little experiment.
Google has about 430 findings on my name. These include two others carrying the same name, which is astounding to me. But since I’m not unique by name it will be harder to profile me, or will it?
Multiple listings of Stayfriends and franchises that keeps me in touch with my schoolmates. My Amazon wishlists… so if you want to get me something nice for Christmas go on. A lot of newsgroup aggregators, since I’m using the good old NTP regularly to solve problems. My ClaimID profile. Some Proxy caches of my Mashable account!? …and another one. A surname collector. What people think of to get their Adsense accounts into good use. My Flixster account is listed on page 9, Last.fm on page 11, Xing is even listed on the last page with a profile of someone who lists me as a contact.
And the conclusion? Anyone knows where I live, where I went to school, what kind of music I prefer, what I think about hundreds of movies, where I work, and most importantly who I know. Although it’s not everything about me, it is a lot of information for someone who is not part of the government machine… and I almost bet I could find as much information about you in 5 minutes.
“Good night, and good luck”