03 Jun 09 A Very Unscientific Experiment in Privacy

The other day a friend of mine remarked how “cute it was that someone was stalking her through the internet”. I know she meant it jokingly, but long-gone are the days when stalkers are considered a bother, much less a threat. I guess somehow it’s become fashionable to take your infatuation to privacy-breaching heights? In a way I sympathize and understand–it’d be nice to have an emotionally overwhelmed person focus their attention on your ultimately, like a puppy dog with a desire to keep odd knick-knacks of you.

But then I thought that I’d look into this case a bit more. Leaving my e-stalkee friend to the excitable whims of her e-stalker, I decided to do just a random test on 2-4 of my friends, and to see if I could find out where they lived, their phone numbers, their presence on major social networking sites, their email addresses and, for extra credit, their place of work. There’s excellent geek cred to be gained for e-stalking friends you already know simply to see how electronic stalking methods work. That’s just meta, man.

Surprisingly, this method worked for all three friends. The fourth friend I was not able to find their phone number or their place of work. I didn’t pay a dime for any of this information and it was accurate, readily available and now in my hands for whatever purposes I might have in mind. I’m now almost considering, as a matter of policy, of Googling people that I hear about and learning more about them–though I wonder to what level I can unsettle some people, when I was what the weather is like on their street address.

I don’t want to come off as a major advocate of privacy and the limitation of information, but I do want to point out how dangerously easy it is for nearly anyone to get this information off the Internet. With someone’s phone number I can easily harass them via phone; with their email I can subscribe them to indecent and horrific newsletters; with their address I can barge in and murder them. In addition some of the results I got also gave me their family and relatives information–perfect if you have a Hatfield-McCoy situation you need resolving.

I am a firm believer in that making all information publicly available means that there is no information that becomes taboo–it opens multiple new avenues of discussion in our country, and the world, that we’ve typically avoided. I would think  a free information society would be a society more willing to question itself and learn more, on top of the added benefit of having free, equitable knowledge available to everyone at no cost.

Does the internet provide us evolved chimpanzees a powerful drug-like concoction of social networking? Networking used to be the stuff of ettiquette, protocol, charisma, grace…but now it seems to be a few keystrokes, 15 minutes of reading, and *shazam* skip the charm school.

And if it’s now considered romantic, and possibly already cliche, to stalk someone you like, then what do true stalkers do these days?