Jonathan Zdziarski wrote this fascinating piece, makes me glad that none of my vehicles have OnStar. Really, REALLY glad. If yours does, you won’t want to miss.

OnStar Begins Spying On Customers’ GPS Location For Profit

Bonus discussion: How soon before such systems become mandatory in every vehicle?

This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, is a very astute response to what’s probably the most common retort, “if you’ve got nothing to hide then there’s nothing to worry about.” Actually, the worries are very, very real.

Go read Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’, by Daniel J. Solove.

But what really blew me away was how available certain information has become. With nothing more than my son’s name and street address Geico was happy to hand back a list of our vehicles. My vehicles – NOT the kid’s vehicles – mine. No authentication, no nothing.

I’m thinking of sitting down with the yearbook. It’s easy enough to associate local addresses with names – Google and the Post Office are glad to help with that – unless maybe your name’s Patel. Then do the lookups and compile the vehicle lists – again, easy, as we’ve discovered. In fact, since I’m tech, I’d automate that part. With that humming along it’s time to put on the marketing hat… Who’d be interested in who drives what? How ’bout you?

One thing’s interesting, though. They didn’t list my motorcycles.

I was reading about some of the inappropriate uses of telephone records when I ran across this unclassified document from the U.S. Department of Justice entitled A Review of the FBI’s Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records.

I’m just throwing it out there, have fun if you care to. Patience, the document’s a little under 6 MB.

http://www.webpronews.com/house-says-bloggers-dont-count-as-journalists-2009-03

[...] some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9786

This Infromation Information Week article called ‘Google Is Watching, Perhaps Soon In Your Home‘ crossed my desk recently. It’s interesting in that it talks both about the Big Brother aspects as well as the utility – and coming necessity (I believe) – of these tools.

Regarding Google specifically, the jury’s still out. Are they good? Evil? Some of their products are very compelling and I use them to help me run and monitor my various Web properties. I refuse to install their desktop products because of their phone-home philosophies. Their mapping products are nothing short of mind-blowing. But their corporate secrecy and double-talk is nauseating. <shrug> You plunks down your quarter and you takes your chances.

New Jersey, despite the well-deserved reputation for corruption and scandal, happens to be one of the states at the forefront of legislatively protecting its citizens from the perils of data aggregation. That’s probably because the legislators want to protect themselves but, hey, I’ll take it wherever I can get it.

Anyway, it’s an interesting article, go check it out.

Unexpected incoming calls carry an inherent risk. You just can’t tell who’s on the other end! (It’s where the word ‘phoney’ came from, by the way.)

My voice mail contained one such message a couple of days ago. When I returned the call and provided a ‘reference number’ from the message, the voice asked for my fax number. There were some documents requiring some additional information along with my signature. And soon my documents arrived.

Yesterday I pulled the PDF into an editor, added the required information and pasted in my signature. It was time to fax them back. Here’s where it got interesting.

Remember, the request was unexpected and came from an untrusted source. The fax-back number was unfamiliar, as was the originating office in a different part of the country. So I phoned up the main customer service number for verification.

The agent was very accommodating and understood why I was calling. But it took the better part of a half-hour before the office and fax number were pronounced to be legitimate. The wait on their toll-free number, made comfortable by my headset (which allowed me to continue with other work) was well-worth the assurance. I learned that calls like mine were rare indeed; my agent, with years of call center experience, had personally never handled a single instance.

It’s no wonder identity theft is so rampant.

Don’t be a victim. Take the time to verify unknown callers before complying with their requests. If you meet with resistance then perhaps you should consider taking your business elsewhere. It just might be an indication of the care they take in caring for the confidential information in their custody.

An odd pattern had developed in the advertising that appeared in my incoming streams. Affecting both snail mail and email, it was almost as though my health had taken a serious turn for the worse. Drugs, facilities and other products related to various diseases, diseases which I do not have, had been increasing in frequency dramatically!

I brought my concerns to the head pharmacist, the management of the company (it’s a chain) and my credit card issuer. Their response was universal. Sharing the data isn’t allowed. [We] do not do it. It is not done. I must be mistaken.

So I took to using cash. And when asked to sign when picking up the medications I use something else – an X, some scribbles or a line – whatever comes out of my hand at the time. If questioned I tell them why.

After quite a while – six months, maybe more – the marketing trailed off. Today the patterns I noticed no longer exist. (I suppose they all figure me for dead, finally succumbed to one disease or another.)

I brought my findings to the pharmacy and credit card issuer and asked again about marketing and data-sharing. Again, each defended their practices. I must be mistaken.

The traffic in my inbox is of little importance. What’s more worrisome is how else the data might be used. I can easily imagine, for example, an insurance company increasing their rates, or maybe denying coverage altogether, because I have a history of purchasing prescription drugs associated with a disease I haven’t reported to them. Legal? Not today. But since when has that stopped anything?

Watch your data trail, dear friends!