Comments on: The Public/Private Database Industry http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2009/12/03/the-publicprivate-database-industry/ a dingpolitik of cyborgs, cyberculture & cyberspace Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:36:00 +0000 hourly 1 By: gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2009/12/03/the-publicprivate-database-industry/comment-page-1/#comment-3264 gtdonovan Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:52:50 +0000 http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=818#comment-3264 Hi Stuart - All you have to do is visit cryptome.org and you'll see exactly how the government keeps track of data on the internet. Every piece of data privately aggregated by corporations like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, ATT, etc... is available to the government at little cost. Or, you could consult the Government Accountability Office's 2007 report on some of the data mining programs currently underway at the Department of Homeland Security (I discussed the report a bit, and linked to it <a href="http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/04/07/young-person-of-interest/" rel="nofollow">in this post</a>). To your second point - whether or not people setup email accounts with fake names is irrelevant. Even with a fake name there is a whole range of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is still aggregated which alone could still identify you. Combine this information with the PII in other databases, and you can almost certainly be identified. You can consult Greg Conti's "Googling Security" and Paul Ohm's "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization" for a detailed account of how this works. Thanks for the comment! Hi Stuart – All you have to do is visit cryptome.org and you’ll see exactly how the government keeps track of data on the internet. Every piece of data privately aggregated by corporations like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, ATT, etc… is available to the government at little cost. Or, you could consult the Government Accountability Office’s 2007 report on some of the data mining programs currently underway at the Department of Homeland Security (I discussed the report a bit, and linked to it in this post).

To your second point – whether or not people setup email accounts with fake names is irrelevant. Even with a fake name there is a whole range of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is still aggregated which alone could still identify you. Combine this information with the PII in other databases, and you can almost certainly be identified. You can consult Greg Conti’s “Googling Security” and Paul Ohm’s “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization” for a detailed account of how this works.

Thanks for the comment!

]]> By: Stuart Miles http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2009/12/03/the-publicprivate-database-industry/comment-page-1/#comment-3238 Stuart Miles Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:09:49 +0000 http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=818#comment-3238 I don't really see how the government can keep track of data on the internet. Many people set up extra email accounts in fake names for a lot of the stuff they do. I don’t really see how the government can keep track of data on the internet. Many people set up extra email accounts in fake names for a lot of the stuff they do.

]]>