If you’re not worried about privacy, you don’t know Diddly
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There’s nothing like a gathering of electronic privacy advocates to put someone who’s already a little freaked out about all the personal information coursing through the Internet into a state of panic. After a couple of days at the 18th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven, Conn., we’re scanning the skies for black helicopters.
Some of the attendees talked about how they encrypt every one of their e-mails, surf the Web through ‘anonymizing’ servers such as Tor or the Free Network Project, and scrub their laptop hard drives before crossing the border to prevent government airport screeners from downloading files. Even the group’s logo, at right, is creepy.
But given the vast amounts of personal data being collected by U.S. agencies and private companies, such as Google and Facebook, it’s a stretch to say these folks are paranoid.
Take the example of Diddly.com. The site allows you to look at pictures all over the Web, generated by the surprising fact that most digital cameras assign the same sorts of file names to images. By randomly generating requests based on those file names, the site allows you a voyeuristic peek at photos from Flickr, Picasa, family websites and other locations around the Web.
A randomly generated search for ‘_MG_1275.jpg,’ the kind of file name often assigned to a digital photo, turned up a few hundred images, including an adorable curly haired toddler, a pug named Morgan, a backyard party, a youth soccer all-star team and someone named Ashvin with his arm around his mom.
There doesn’t appear to be anything nefarious about Diddly’s Random Personal Picture Finder. But it’s a good bet that the people who posted those pictures never assumed that strangers could or would find them.
And that’s the point that panelists and participants at the conference, one of the oldest annual gatherings of the digital age, have been making all week: There’s a lot of data out there about all of us, and we had better start worrying about it.
‘It’s actually cheaper to collect and store than get rid of things,’ Jack M. Balkin, director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, said at a panel discussion titled ‘The National Surveillance State and the Next Administration.’ ‘So everything will be remembered.”
-- Jim Puzzanghera
Puzzanghera, a staff writer, covers tech and media policy from Washington.
Image courtesy of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference.
