Eduard Goodman calls himself a "privacy guy" after a dozen years in the profession. The chief privacy officer at Identification Theft 911 keeps close tabs on industry shifts and believes people in the
U.S. think of privacy in a limited context.
Americans consider a privacy leak to be people taking personal information without their permission and committing identity theft, but few understand
what privacy means when it comes to companies following a person's footprint through the Internet to target ads. Personalized ads provide convenience, but it means companies know everything about
consumers, from what search queries they make to the coffee they drink to the books downloaded from Amazon onto their Kindles. The information is indexed, downloaded and cross-referenced.
Goodman and I both adopted the Internet early. So, I asked him, "Do you really believe online privacy can exist in any form?" He said "At one time I was a big believer in the old statement 'On the
Internet no one knows you're a dog.' That's no longer true, and the concept erodes a little more every day."
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Today, there's a bit of privacy on the Net, depending on how intelligently you
behave online, but it's slowly starting to disappear, Goodman says. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but rather a double-edge sword.
Anonymity leads to online fraud; actually
having total transparency on the Internet diminishes the possibility of identity theft and fraud. Goodman says Google now has the ability to identify someone with a dozen photographs because they
likely link into other information about you online.
"Privacy is slowing starting to vanish," Goodman admits. "When it comes to political dissidents, people speaking out about government and
abusing the Internet for the promise of those tools of democratization, the death of privacy kills that, too."
Corporations with resources still have some level of privacy, but it's not clear
how long that will last, Goodman says. Take Wikileaks, for example. The repository provides raw data on government secrets. There's all this data floating around the Internet, from emails in the mid
1990s to Facebook. Hubs across the Internet create copies of the bits and bytes that travel the pipes. The problem has been correlating the data and connecting the dots. Now we can.