| I, SysAdmin. | Written By: Jane |
Sysadmins are, by their very nature, a little paranoid. It's in their
blood (and a default feature of most every mail system) to keep little
logs of what messages were sent where, who logged in from *.gov, the
average number of files in /pub/incoming/.juarez/...secret/fILeS, and the
number of times some user named mess jorrissette (name
changed to protect the incident) ran pine (the current count is 176 since
Sep 15).
-rw-r--r-- 1 mess users 10240 Nov 10 1996 file.doc
Imaginitave filenames always thrill me.
All this logging got me thinking about privacy and the common user. How much do the websites you visit know about you? Are cookies, those little bits of information that websites use to keep track of what pages you visit, really plotting to steal your personal information and ruin your credit history?
The simple fact is that the only sites big enough to worry about analyzing their traffic to the extent that they know who YOU are have too many visitors to bother.
Certainly, it's possible with services such as doubleclick to get a sort of profile of a user, but that information is not tied at all to a users's individual identity. In fact, the individual profiles usually disappear into so many bits when they are analyzed along with the millions of other user profiles their logs create.
Does this mean that concerns about privacy on the net are blown up until they've reached the hype status of the Spice Girls? Certainly not. If you've got critically sensitive data you're submitting via e-mail, and you fear your local sysadmin has a nasty habit of "accidentally" searching through the local mail directory, you might want to consider using PGP to encrypt the message. If you don't want people knowing where you're surfing from, check out the anonymizer, a service that hides you from the net by making it look like all requests are coming from their server. Now let's say you want to send e-mail, but can't afford to let anyone know who you are (for situations when you have to be discreet about that bit of Democratic Fundraising information you left on your desk last week). Replay has just the service for you.
Common sense, of course, is also a great resource. If you don't want anyone to know where you live, don't give them your address. Afraid someone will call you at home? Give them your neighbor's phone number. Give them my phone number (I love unwanted phone calls... "Hold on a second while I trace this call, would you?").
In short, be paranoid, but not too paranoid. Don't refuse cookies, always look for the big hoaxes, and remember the alamo.
On second thought, maybe naming your important file file.doc
isn't such a bad idea after all... noone will ever bother to look at the
contents.