"Privacy is dead"

"Privacy is dead - get over it", according to Steve Rambam, a private investigator specialising in Internet privacy cases. It may well be that he is right. Far more of what you do online can be tracked than you probably realise. How much does it matter? Discussing this with a friend yesterday, he commented that he has no concerns because everything he does is above board. Robert X. Cringeley (yes, that's his real name) explains several reasons why even the innocent should be concerned. While some of his illustrations are American, exactly the same principles apply here in NZ. What he didn't dwell on is how officialdom can badly mishandle data - for instance, we constantly read stories of innocent people suffering injustices because some department or other has mistaken them for someone else, or because the department's computer is incapable of correcting wrong data that gets entered against a person. All email and cellphone traffic around the world is now scanned by government security agencies for keywords that might alert them to terrorist or other undesirable activity. You and I can quite unwittingly - and innocently - use those keywords in our conversation and have our details flagged. Huge amounts have been written on this. Erik Larkin's PC World article is a good starting point, and I would also suggest this Wikipedia article to learn more.