Net Privacy and The New York Times

The April 30, 2000, issue of the Sunday New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy Net privacy article, “The Eroded Self,” by Jeffrey Rosen. While the author makes some good points, frankly, it glosses over (or trivializes) some important aspects of Internet privacy (or lack of it). The resulting stilted viewpoint reflects on The New York Times’ cyber-attitude as much as on Mr Rosen. This is not the first time columnists have taken the NYT to task on issues regarding the Internet. Space here does not allow for detailed explanation of the entire article. Here are a few highlights.

A Poor Start

The piece starts by using Monica Lewinsky as an example of an “advocate of privacy in cyberspace.” Unless Monica changed her cyber-activities from selling handbags on the therealmonicainc.com web site to joining the board of directors at EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), quotations from her book and comments made during an appearance on Larry King Live set the wrong tone.

The author goes on to state, “for most citizens, however, the greatest threat to privacy does not come from special prosecutors, but from employers and from all-seeing web sites and advertising networks that track every online move we make.” Let us stop right here for a few comments.

After several readings of the article, I came away with the notion that the author feels that an individual has (or should have) total privacy when using company/institution-owned computer networks/hardware/software. The courts have consistently sided with the computer owners when it comes to reading personal e-mail or tracking computer usage in the workplace. Mr Rosen appears shocked by this revelation. He wrote: “Most recently courts have held that merely by adopting a written policy that warns employees that their e-mail may be monitored, employees will lower expectations of privacy in a way that gives them virtually unlimited discretion to monitor whatever they please.”

As I see it, the corporation/institution owns the computer, software, pays the electricity bill, owns the IP (Internet Protocol) address, and ponies up the cost of the bandwidth. That gives them rights to everything in or on the system. This “appalls” Mr Rosen. How about this? Suppose a UPS driver, on his own, took one of those brown trucks home (naturally after hours) in order to help his brother-in-law move furniture. Well, that would be the same as taking the computer network out for a spin to view some web sites and check a few stock quotes on the Information Superhighway during a lunch break. Mr Rosen sees this latter activity as some type of employee right. Frankly, I do not see the courts changing position on the employer’s right to monitor computer activity any time soon. If anything, using the Bill Gates e-mail against Microsoft during the anti-trust trial only strengthened this posture. Basically, since the corporation owns the hardware, they make all the rules. You have no privacy when using corporate/institution computers. Get over it.

Privacy Is Like The Weather

Mr Rosen recognizes that many surfers are not concerned about privacy. He states, “Moreover, many people seem happy to waive their privacy rights in exchange for free stuff.” He sure jumped on the obvious. In April ‘99, during the first three weeks of the offer, 1.25 million people requested a free PC (and Internet access) in exchange for revealing detailed surfing habits. Privacy advocates were stunned. Essentially, many cybercitizens talk a good game about privacy but do very little to protect it. At home, people can surf anonymously with little effort; in reality, they do not. E-mail becomes very private with free encryption software such as PGP (pretty good privacy). Rarely is it used. Surfers can easily set up anonymous e-mail addresses and use them for logging into chat rooms. Again, this is not the norm because it requires extra effort. How often do Internet users change passwords? Rarely, I suspect. Frankly, only when Joe or Jane Surfer get serious about privacy matters will there be noticeable changes in habits.

Back to Monica

Near the end of the article Rosen quotes Monica’s interview on Larry King: “One of the things that I was a little bit disappointed about was that people didn’t seem to pay too much attention about their privacy issues.” According to the LA Times, and other news sources, there are 246,000 missing e-mails at the White House dating back to the time of Monica’s internship. Perhaps Monica caught a cyber-privacy-break. Most of us probably would not be so fortunate.

Should surfers take prudent steps to protect their privacy? Absolutely. Will they? Probably not. Has cyberspace morphed into the Orwellean nightmare depicted by Mr Rosen and the editors at the NYT? Hardly.

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of interest:

http://www.nyt.com

http://www.eff.org

(This is the 205th of a series of elementary articles designed for surfing the Internet. Next, “Spam Update” is the subject on tap. Stay Tuned. Until next week, happy travels through cyberspace. Previous issues of Internet Info for Real People can be found: http://www.thebee.com. Please e-mail comments and suggestions: rbrand@JUNO.com or editor@thebee.com.)