Imagine the smarmy guy who works in your office or goes to your school, coming up to you and boasting that he has a precise list of the books, videos, and articles of clothing you bought last month online -- or offline, for that matter -- including the trip to Victoria's Secret.
Imagine a stalker or other nut knowing your street address and telephone number, the restaurants you frequent, and your vacation plans.
Imagine a defrauder knowing your Social Security number, bankcard numbers, mother's maiden name, date and place of birth, and five favorite passwords.
What else is new, you ask?
Try this: What is utterly new is that anyone willing to spend a few bucks and a little time on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, with their fearsome secret police, could ever have learned about the inhabitants of their totalitarian states. The information age has brought with it a revolution in surveillance that makes Gestapo intelligence-gathering seem puny and inefficient in comparison. In those totalitarian societies, you could, if you were lucky, hide, blend in, pursue a life that remained more or less private.
No more. In this brave new world, every transaction you make adds that much more information to the universal data bank known as the Internet. And now it isn't just the government, acting like Big Brother, that is watching you; in fact, Big Brother often has to hire wizards from the private sector to help him out. The Internet was once ballyhooed as the ultimate extension of unregulated freedom, one in which people could explore their own heavens and hells online, unobserved. The reality is that your privacy rights don't exist. Indeed, online, you don't exist; your profile does, and it will be sorted and packaged and sold. The right to personal privacy, arguably the most cherished of human freedoms, is fast becoming a distant memory. Oracles of the New Economy tell us more good than bad will come from it. "You already have zero privacy -- get over it," announces Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, a company that coincidentally was developing software that, according to The New York Times, makes hash of your privacy. McNealy and others almost make it sound acceptable, a price worth paying for the wonders of targeted marketing.
Take the recent issue of the cookies planted on the hard drives of visitors to the Web site of the White House drug enforcement office. They're only one of many kinds of Web bugs -- invisible to the naked eye, embedded beneath the text and graphics of sites you visit. They sit quietly in your computer, taking notes far more efficiently than any olive-in-the-martini device Ian Fleming could dream up. On the White House drug site, the note-taking was accomplished by DoubleClick, a company that primarily gathers data for private businesses and that has already assembled profiles of the habits, tastes, and vital statistics of 100 million Americans. So we can assume that the sort of information government agencies have obtained about us is now available to any entity that can pay the fees of a company such as DoubleClick.
But just because it has become common doesn't make it less troubling. The point of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was that the public would come to accept totalitarian intrusion as a part of the normal fabric of life, as something that was actually good for them. We are fast approaching the point where we're inured to the cameras that record us when we enter stores, to the telephone company that asks for reams of personal information before connecting our service, to the hospital social worker who needs to know more about your personal habits than you had thought about yourself. All that data, collected from the most disparate sources, is then recycled into recognizable clumps of information, slices of you, to be devoured by others.
