Peter Sinclair: How to find cyber-privacy

There was a time when loss of privacy consisted merely of the unguarded moment, the purloined letter, an ear pressed greedily to the keyhole…

But in the electronic age, almost anyone can hack into your life.

Each week the issue of online privacy comes to a fiercer boil as the Internet, like a vast unlocked diary, yields up its secrets to any nosy parker who cares to look. Read about it at the Electronic Privacy information Centre [www.epic.org].

An unfocussed awareness of the problem sharpened dramatically when it was revealed that two giants of the industry, Microsoft and Intel, had (with the best intentions) engineered hardware and software respectively in such a way that usage became trackable.

Both seemed surprised by the resulting storm: Intel for its Pentium III serial numbers, Microsoft with its formerly obscure "globally unique identifiers" in every copy of Windows 98 and every Office document. Both backpedalled - Windows 2000, for instance, will ship without GUIDs.

First of all, I suppose, you have to ask yourself just how important your online privacy is to you, really. Only you can decided how paranoid you're prepared to be in pursuit of it - whether a few password-protected files are enough or you need something more. Even if, according to Privacy Commissioner Bruce Slane in Rotorua last month, "New Zealand consumers have an advantage", this only applies within New Zealand; globally, our Privacy Act is toothless.

You may feel like joining the thousands now checking out a suite of powerful privacy tools in Filemine's shareware and freeware "Protect Your Privacy Pack" [www.filemine.com/showPack?id=114]
Kremlin is both an encryption and deletion utility which rounds up the sensi-tive data that Windows strews all over your HD, and its Sentry feature can automatically secure both drive and memory when you leave your machine; Cycode encodes and decodes email with rather less fuss than PGP [Pretty Good Privacy - www.arc.unm.edu/~drosoff/pgp/pgp.html]; SessionWall-3 beefs up a firewall with scanning, blocking, detection, alerting, logging and response functions; Desktop Surveillance 98 - a boss's dream, an employee's nightmare - records all activity on a computer or just that of certain applications; and Norton Secret Stuff creates self-decrypting executables you can send via email or over a network.

Obviously no-one likes the idea of some geekish voyeur pawing through their hard drive sniffing the underwear, but it's rather more than just a question of whether there's anything on your HD you wouldn't want someone to see.

Where you live and what you eat for dinner might seem relatively insignificant facts; but the minor details of a million personal lives, when aggregated, become highly marketable so that there's a powerful incentive for the practice of secretly harvesting them to become even more widespread. Just visiting certain websites is potentially enough if they're booby-trapped with a wisp or two of malicious Javascript.

If you feel your footprints in cyberspace are nobody's business but yours, the answer may be to subscribe to one of the anonymity services - Freedom [www.zks.net], Anonymizer [www.anonymizer.com], Aixs [http://aixs.net/aixs], Lucent [www.bell-labs.com/project/lpwa] or the National Research Laboratory's Onion Router [www.onion-router.net].

But Phar Lap Software's Richard Smith [he's the man who nabbed namesake David Smith, creater of the Melissa virus] recently reported that he managed to attack and disenable the protective mechanisms of most of these services, all of whom are now sitting up late stitching patches.

For, as Anonymizer's president, Lance Cottrell, commented: "There's no such thing as a perfectly secure system, unless it's welded shut in a box… "

Privacy is largely a philosophical concept, after all, and The Economist [www.economist.com] speculates that "The era of urban ano-nymity already looks like a mere historical interlude…The future may be like the past, when few except the rich enjoyed much privacy…

"Get used to it".

BookMarks

THE FURBY ALTERNATIVE: Virtual Dog

Walk the dog without leaving the keyboard - both pet and park are virtual. Visit the pound and pick a pooch [you have to supply an email address or your dog will run away]. I chose an endearingly ugly pug, and naming him was literally a snap at http://home.snap.com/main/channel/item/0,4,-9156,00.html?dd.snap.c5 - the Snap Pet Centre, where I clicked the Technology listing and chose the name which I felt best expressed the spirit of the thing: Gates. And there he was, sitting on a carpet I wouldn't have chosen in a million years amidst clickable furniture - the phone, for example, is preprogrammed to call the Park Supervisor, who let me know a panther had just escaped from the zoo…

Advisory: no walkies today, Gates…

www.virtualdog.com

GOING, GOING… : Yahoo Australia & NZ - Auctions

If you forget about porn, the Internet's grubby secret, auctions are the biggest money-spinners on the Web right now and everyone wants a piece of the action - even mighty Yahoo, which has opened Down Under. Some interest-ing camera buys - I almost bid on a Sony until I saw it had "a few dints on the bottom… " At $US290 and climbing, I demand dintlessness…

Advisory: almost nothing Australasian, but a section for Black Americana…?

http://au.auctions.yahoo.com/au/