Yostivanich

An inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non has been hap­pen­ing with my life recently. I’m mov­ing a ridicu­lous amount of data online. Just look at the side­bar of this blog to see all the data I have online that is pub­licly avail­able to any­one. You have what prod­ucts I am inter­ested in buy­ing, what I am read­ing online, pho­tos I’m tak­ing, when I’m busy and not busy and even what I am doing right now at this very instance.

It’s insane to me for sev­eral reasons.

1. I have exposed cer­tainly enough for some­one to fig­ure out a great deal about myself with­out ever meet­ing me.
2. I let the world know where I am or what I am work­ing on pretty close to 24/7, good thing I don’t have any stalk­ers they wouldn’t have to work at stalk­ing me.
3. I still con­sider myself an extremely pri­vate person.

That last one espe­cially puz­zled me until a few weeks or so ago. It’s all a mat­ter of con­ve­nience and a recog­ni­tion that infor­ma­tion is never going to get harder to find out only easier.

Slash­dot today posted an arti­cle about shop­ping cen­ters in UK that are track­ing cell phones to see what stores are most fre­quently vis­ited and in what order. This sort of capa­bil­ity has been avail­able for a long period of time and I lit­er­ally have my cell phone with me all the time. There is another web­site, UK only, where you can type in a cell phone num­ber and see where the phone is. Of course the first time you do so the ser­vice sends a text mes­sage to allow the site to dis­play your loca­tion, but after that no warn­ing. So gain con­trol of my phone for about 30 sec­onds, con­firm and delete the text mes­sage and you can track me to your heart’s content.

Unfor­tu­nately as Bruce Schneier is fond of say­ing “bits are never going to get harder to copy, only eas­ier.” In the same sense infor­ma­tion about me is never going to get harder to find, only eas­ier. Granted I am speed­ing up that process with my pro­lific usage of the above men­tioned web sites. How­ever bet­ter for me to have con­trol of the data and infor­ma­tion, than for it to be col­lected with­out my knowl­edge and what data I do vol­un­teer is more likely to pop up first in a search about me.

The other part of this is the con­ve­nience of hav­ing the infor­ma­tion online. I lit­er­ally need to sign onto a cou­ple of web­sites and I have access to just about any­thing I could ever need. As of right now those sites are Google and Remem­ber The Milk, though all that Google needs to do is cre­ate a good to-do list and I will have just about all my data on Google’s servers. E-mail and con­tacts (Gmail), cal­en­dar (Google Cal­en­dar), ran­dom doc­u­ments (Google Docs) includ­ing shop­ping lists, gift ideas for friends, school work, some ran­dom stuff for work, my bud­get. I joke with some of my friends that Google is my god, in a lot of ways Google may not be my god, but they know almost as much as a god could about me. I’m wait­ing for Google to know what I want to search for before I do so.

Part 2: I will talk about what are some of the lim­its that I do place with what I expose online.