Everybody's heard about the now-infamous Paris Hilton sidekick incident. It's been the subject of numerous Internet parodies, television hijinkery, and entertainment gossip. Apparently, in a similar incident, Jimmy Buffet's phone was stolen by a restaurant busboy and used to "crank yank" former president Bill Clinton.
So where am I going with this? Who cares, right? Everybody nowadays has a cell phone, PDA, sidekick, nomad, iPod, or some other easily-misplaced digital information appliance. We use them to store everything: pictures, phone numbers, music, plans to the death star, etc. One often-overlooked fact in all this is that these devices of today are more and more frequently starting to obviate the privacy measures of yesterday. In other words, Bill Clinton thought his number was unlisted and inaccessible to the casual prank caller; it was, and it would have stayed that way if it weren't for a lost cell phone half a hemisphere away.
There are three trends at work: 1) these unsecured devices are starting to carry more data and more types of data. 2) these devices are becoming more ubiquitous. 3) any data on these devices can be (as was the case with Paris' data) instantaneously shared amongst interested parties across the globe. I think, looking down the road, that privacy erosion is less about government "big brother" (as argued by Orwell) or the numerous corporate "little brothers" (although this is slightly more prevalent.) After all, pro-privacy folks at least have a chance to fight back on those fronts. What scares me much more is the large array of personal "micro brothers" - the "Amway"-tization of privacy loss. By the time anybody notices, there will be no such thing as an "unlisted number", "private IM account", or anonymous email address; how can there be when all this data is stored in so many different places and can be instantly shared? Call me cynical, but I think it's only a matter of time; for the truth of this, just ask all the famous people who had to change their number as a result of Paris' hacked side-kick account - or ask Bill Clinton for that matter. You can still find their phone numbers on Google.
Posted by Ed at June 9, 2005 11:14 AM