Life In A Fishbowl

CBS' Larry Magid On The Availability Of Personal Info Via The Web

(CBS) 
Before anyone gets too upset about the information stored by Google and other Web sites, consider what else is known about you.

Your bank knows about every check you write, your credit card companies have a record of all your charges, phone companies know who you’re talking to. If you use one of those club cards, your grocery store knows what you’re buying. The same might be true if you pay by ATM or credit card. Your health care provider and health insurance company know just about everything about your state-of-health.

In other words, the vast majority of us live lives that are very well documented.

The whole system is based on trust. If you want to enjoy the benefits of a credit card, you must voluntarily allow the issuing company that information on the assurances that they won’t misuse it.

You could pay for everything with cash, get a pre-paid cell phone account and only use the Internet from public terminals where you don’t have to identify yourself.

But there is almost no way to be completely anonymous. If you drive a car, your license number is on display for anyone to jot down and find out who you are. It’s illegal to get on a plane without showing ID and forget about renting a car or spending the night at a hotel or motel.

Unfortunately, there are times when the trust is violated such as the well publicized recent cases where database and credit card processing companies have accidentally disclosed personal information that they warehouse about the public. The sad part about that is there is nothing any of us can do to protect ourselves. It’s not as if you and I necessarily willingly disclosed that information to the companies that store it. They get it – legally – from companies we do business with.

There are also plenty of Web sites which, for a fee, will disclose a great deal of publicly available information about people. My wife was trying to re-connect with a college roommate. Googling her didn’t help because she has an extremely common name. All we knew was the town she grew up in.

A friend of mine who is a former executive of one of those data warehousing companies offered to help. Armed with only her name and the town she grew up in, it took him less than a minute to come up with a complete report on her including her married name, the names and addresses of her neighbors, her employment history, information about her family and even the sad news that her dad recently died. And this was only the publicly available data. There is plenty more for law enforcement, credit companies and anyone who can masquerade as someone with a legitimate reason to find peer into the depth of what these companies know about us.

Like it or not, we all live in a fish bowl.

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A syndicated technology columnist for nearly two decades, Larry Magid serves as on air Technology Analyst for CBS Radio News. His technology reports can be heard several times a week on the CBS Radio Network. Magid is the author of several books including "The Little PC Book."