• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, July 8, 2011

In all of the nearly hysterical coverage of allegations that Rupert's News of the World tapped into the phone voicemail of, among others, a schoolgirl murdered in 2002, the relatives of servicemen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the families of victims of the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London, the word "hacked" is used time and again. It is one of those words that has taken on frightening connotations in the digital era upon us. It conjures up imagines of Red Bull-fueled Eastern European cybergeeks sitting at multiple screens, bombarding sites with millions of lines of code designed to get past firewalls and uncover secrets great and small.

Then you come to understand that "hacking" cell phone voicemail is as simple as calling the person's phone, getting the VM recorded answer and using the default code that came with the phone to gain access to VM messages. Apparently lots of folks never personalize their answer codes. So much for "hacking."  One publication actually listed this among the great "hacks" of all time, ranking it right up there with when the names, addresses, emails, login IDs, passwords, and credit-card numbers of 100 million Sony Playstation Network and Online Entertainment customers were compromised by real hackers.

But this couldn't happen to a more appropriate CEO or company, since News Corp. has built its global audiences on hyperbole and fear-mongering. If there is the hint of a greater disaster or conspiracy laying ahead, you can be sure News Corps networks and publications will be the first to leverage them, however inaccurate they turn out to be.

Even the Wall Street Journal caught the bug. The coverage of "What They Know," the seemingly endless "investigation" into Web tracking used overheated headlines like "The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets" to, well, overstate the dangers to the individual of being cookie-tracked by companies tasked with serving more relevant ads. Brushing aside industry expert after expert reassurance that PII was not the objective of cookie tracking, the WSJ nevertheless played it fast and loose, encouraging the man on the street to agree that being tracked was "creepy" and somehow inappropriate. When interviewed on TV about the series, the WSJ reporters used broad brushes to paint the online ad industry in the worst possible light.

These days they are all jacked up, because the series won a journalism award, and lots of bills to "protect online privacy" have been tossed onto the floor of Congress like so many grenades. But what about the public that the series was allegedly designed to serve? Now that they have digested thousands of column inches of "revelations," have they gathered in mobs outside the offices of ad servers to burn CEOs in effigy and demand more "protection"? Nope. Have they done what they could have all along and reset their cookie acceptance level in their browser settings? Nope.  Has ad-blocking software become the new black? Nope. Have they stormed the NAI and issued Do Not Track orders to one ad network after another? Nope.

And for god's sakes, let's stop saying they haven't because they "don't understand." They understand (just like they understood before the WSJ got hot and bothered); they just don't care. Just like they don't care about the hundreds of ways their PII is compromised by offline data collectors,  from their grocery store to their credit card companies. Most folks don't even bother with sophisticated passwords to protect their online banking, much less the dozens of other ecommerce sites where they store their credit card numbers and PII data so they can one-click through check-out. Turns out they already knew what the WSJ thought they didn't.

Nice to see News Corp. getting a little taste of their own medicine.