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Disreputable Internet sites have started urging unwitting visitors to 'volunteer' their friends for invasions of privacy.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

In the battle over Internet privacy, our friends are going to turn us in


April 25, 2001


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers

   I was hunting down a long-lost Web site the other day when a window popped open to tell me I qualified for a $115 shopping spree. All I had to do was fill out a form, giving my name, age, hobbies and e-mail address.
   I might be dumb now and then, but I'm not THAT dumb. I know advertising shams when I see them. No way am I going to send some idiot all that personal info.
   But what caught my attention was something insidious. Among the blanks you are supposed to fill in was one asking for the e-mail address of one of your closest friends.
   Uh-oh. We are all in trouble. Times have changed. The world is not what we thought it was.
   Your friends are going to turn you in.
   It no longer matters whether you try as hard as you can to avoid giving out your e-mail address and other private information over the Internet. Forget the idea of personal privacy. Your friends are going to do you a favor. They're going to fill out all those forms for you.
   I'm alarmed. And it's not because I think all of us have rat-fink friends. I have very good friends. You probably do, too.
   I'm upset because most of us have friends who don't have a clue about protecting themselves on the Internet, and that means they won't even stop to think about protecting us. They'll just give out the e-mail addresses of everyone they know, thinking that they're doing good deeds.
   Maybe it's time for a national day of Internet reckoning. We all need to wake up, and our friends need to pay attention, too.
   We all need to understand the three rules of Internet privacy:
   1. You don't have any guarantees of privacy. People are snooping into your life all the time. You can't stop them. All you can do is make life harder for them.
   2. You should never give out your name or your e-mail address to a stranger or to a strange Web site.
   3. You must never "volunteer" your friends for anything. You'll sentence them to a life of pestilence if you do.
   The problem is easy to explain but hard to understand. There are hundreds of thousands of sites on the Internet preying on you and me. That's easy to say. But few of you actually believe this. Most people find it intrinsically hard to understand that hundreds of thousands of people without ethics and morals are out there, somewhere, trying to take advantage of the rest of us.
   But they are. They trick us into giving out our e-mail addresses so they can sell lists of names and addresses for junk-mail companies. They snoop into our habits so they can track what we do, then they sell that information to marketing companies. They commit what surely is the ultimate bad-faith scam by telling us they'll take our names off their mailing lists if we write back to them -- and then they gleefully celebrate with every confirmed e-mail address that comes back in, selling those confirmed addresses for a lot more money than the blind addresses they used in the first mailing.
   They do all this and more. Some of them trick children into following innocent-looking links that lead to porn sites. The people who do this -- these lower-than-all-scum Web operators -- know that many kids will be too embarrassed to report what happened and too curious to avert their eyes.
   Some of them just send us mountains of drivel -- messages about "nature's own Viagra," e-mail letters about "how to beat the odds at Vegas" or advertising banners that invite us to find out how to spy on each other.
   This stuff makes me sick. But what makes me feel worse is the realization that most people who cruise from one Internet site to the other don't know how vulnerable they are. It's time they caught on. If they don't, they won't just be jeopardizing themselves.
   Now that disreputable Internet sites have started urging unwitting visitors to turn in their friends, the clueless millions all around us -- our friends, relatives and neighbors -- are endangering the rest of us, too. It's time to sound the alarm.