Learning to Profile the Internet User Profile

In his NY Times March 16th article, "How Privacy Disappears Online," reporter Steve Lohr investigates recent academic e-experiments that show the ease with which one's identity (even with careful attention to safeguarding private info) can be determined.

Lohr found that

"You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

'Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,' said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. 'In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.'

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive 'social signature,' researchers say."

Lohr learned that "the F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a 'do not track' list, similar to the federal 'do not call' list, to stop online monitoring," which does show one of the ways in which legislative bodies are working with the transition to digital culture.

Lohr closes his article by quoting Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, Kleinberg is "skeptical that rules will have much impact," and suggests to internet users that "'when you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.'"