Monster

It's funny hearing people up in arms over the President's indiscriminate abuse of wiretaps - to hear the people talk about violation of the trust. Was it Scott McNealy who said "you have no privacy - get over it." Indeed.

I got more spam from Monster.com this morning. They send me a lot of junk - usually I just ignore it; this morning I thought I'd go and turn off the source. I registered at Monster.com several YEARS ago -- I have not got any legitimate employment inquires through there website (though I have got a lot of junk mail and offers to assist me by writing my resume or paying people to find me a job). Like many online services founded before Google published their mission statement including the words "don't be evil," Monster's customer account section shows masterful obfuscation. You can't just tell them to stop sending you spam - you need to log on, verify your address, phone number and e-mail (the very tools they are using to annoy you), then access their copious lists of "FREE" services and disable them one by one.

Admitted, I'm bit ashamed of myself that I entrusted my personal information to an organization that displays such thin ethics. My instinct tells me get out - delete everything. Posting here is only bringing me wasted bandwidth and wasted time. Hmmm. There is no way to cancel your account from the account management section of their website. You need to dig through a few FAQs and help screens to find out that -- indeed -- you can't delete your account online, you must instead call them.

Monster plays off of your ego - you post on them because you dream about some company calling you and asking, no, begging you to join their team where you can use your web surfing and video gaming skills to earn $120 an hour. But look at what you are giving them: your education, your confirmed address, your income level -- you're pretty much giving them your identity. When I signed on, I never thought to even ask "do I trust these people?"

So, yes, I called. And I listened to their robot, and I spoke when prompted and I pressed the proper buttons and I waited for 10 minutes and I confirmed my mailing address, phone number and e-mail address, and she cheerfully said that she's cancelled my account and I am quite sure she was lying. All I had accomplished was to verify my personal contact information. Sure, they'll probably take my resume off line. Delete your record. No. No one does that any more.

25 years ago, computer technology was frightfully expensive, which made it scarce and cool. Today it is unbelievably cheep, which makes it pervasive. 25 years ago, no one would ever think to keep the records of anything anyone ever did forever - I mean, we were all just struggling to make sure payroll worked ok. Things are different now. There's value in knowing everyone else's business - companies are willing to pay for it to improve the marketing, and the only forces that could outlaw it have chosen not to.

I guess a big part of it is that people don't understand what's been lost. "1984" featured a two way television, corrupted language, an endless war of dubious purpose, -- jeez, I never really stopped to think about right now in that context. Anyway - what's been lost. You forget. You're human. Forgetting is a beautiful thing; imagine a world where you remembered everything always. There would no longer be the now, just the infinite sting of regret blaring against the trumpets of pride. Forgetting is peace and forgiveness and now. But computers don't forget unless their operators tell them to.

When my dad was dying, when I raced behind the ambulance to the hospital, when they were admitting him epileptic, babbling -- the administrator accessing his records, referring to events years ago. The medical industries computers never forget. The administrator kept asking me for proof of insurance. She was upset, indicating that he might not be able to stay. A babbling incoherent 80 year old World War 2 combat veteran. And pokey 27 year old community college nurse wannabe is coping an attitude. It took a while to straighten out - the name everyone called dad was not his legal name, and there was someone of similar age who did have that as his legal name, and she did apologize later on, but that was after pulling up completely unrelated medical history and giving it to the attending physician. Off on a tangent again. Monster. Privacy.

A recent item in the news described how the NSA was taping into the trunk lines of the phone system. The article's writer didn't use technical jargon, but what I think he was trying to say is that the NSA is capturing all the switching information and doing data mining. The backbone of the phone system is this technology called SS7 - it's like a very specialized internet that is used to set up and take down connections between phones. When you dial a conventional call, the switch converts it to a data packet that goes through the system, the call is set up and the phone on the other end rings. The whole thing takes less than a second. When they wrote the wiretap laws, this technology didn't exist. From what I read, I get the impression the NSA is trapping all the SS7 information and storing it in a database, then going back and analyzing it to see if it yields anything. Smart and clever - I actually don't have any problem with them doing that. But people should understand that the government knows the number of every phone that communicated with every other phone and at what time and for how long. You could figure out a lot just from that - the actual content of the conversation isn't all that important.

There's also a lot of talk of the anonomy of the Internet. Perhaps in an interpersonal way, yes -- spending large amounts of time typing and looking at a fluorescent screen is not the same as talking and looking at one another's faces. But in terms of privacy, there is none. Every web page you ever visit leaves a trail. Every message you have ever sent may be recorded forever. Every day, people give away all sorts of information with the expectation that it will be forgotten.