Is all the fuss about online privacy justified?

How much of your personal information should be available online for everyone to see? That's been a thorny question for some time, and it was a thought that popped into my head when perusing our recent story on the online publication of pictures of speeding motorists that's currently mooted for one UK county.

A quick word on speeding; I have no speeding tickets on my record, although like many motorists, I have been guilty of slipping a couple of kilometres over the posted limit from time to time. But by 'a couple of kilometres' I'm talking one or two; the number of idiotic people I see who decide that doing 90kph in a 50 zone on a daily basis is a viable idea makes me a very scared driver indeed. I'm not sure whether the RTA should just start mailing out random body parts, or what, as clearly there's a ton of people who don't get the idea. And yes, I'm a self-important jerk, and I still don't like 4WD vehicles. Now, that's out of the way...

The Wiltshire project will apparently be safeguarded so that only the offenders in question can see the happy snaps of their velocity-overridden vehicles, although that's almost like painting a big neon arrow on your server saying 'hack me' -- I suspect the lure of catching people doing what they shouldn't will see the server attacked at least and compromised at worst within seconds of it actually going live.

Even if you take the view that that particular database won't be compromised, there's still plenty of information about who we are and what we do online available for anyone to see. It's something that the vast majority of us don't really think about all that much -- after all, a quick scan of freely available electoral rolls can reveal a host of statistics to us without having to go anywhere near a PC. Aside from the obvious statement that Net searching is a tad easier than scanning down tiny print lines, there's also a couple of key differences to the online publication of details about us.

Firstly, there's the publicity aspect. I might go searching for you in an electoral roll, and that's a very direct act. I might, however, be perusing any of a number of sites and come across other information about you not directly related to me searching for you. One American police district, for example, quite deliberately posts the mugshots of people arrested for engaging in prostitution that week. I've seen many Net users having a brief chuckle at these unfortunate souls -- after all, leaving aside any socio-economic factors, nobody's likely to look their best in a mugshot -- and that public naming and shaming is presumably the reason why it's done -- possibly along with some freedom of information provisions that keep sites like The Smoking Gun so interesting.

The end result is that anything said, published or visualised online about you is essentially available to all; there's no real difficulty in finding this stuff, unlike with an electoral roll, which has to be rather more actively searched through and is presumably verifiable.

The second thing I think online information has that a lot of offline content doesn't is richness and flavour. I know where most of my online writings are published -- some searchable by Google, others not, depending on my nom de plume of choice -- and if you did the research, you'd find out a lot more about me (or anyone) than just their age and residential address for electoral purposes. Sure, some content has slipped through the cracks -- a Web site I used to run that exists solely as a folder on my home PCs, and a few Usenet musings from the early '90s posted via my then-girlfriend's shell account -- but there's still a surprising amount out there. If you've posted anything anywhere, you're probably the same.

That also means that the diatribe you scribbled as an embittered teenager into somebody's forum about how all big businesses are cockroaches on the sofa of society is still out there when your prospective employer goes searching.

It's all out there, and presuming that the basic data structures of the Net survive for the next 60 years or so, it's information that'll outlast most of us.

What do you think? Is there too much information already on the Net? Are you worried by having any of your details online, or is it all a no worries proposition? Talkback to me below!