vRRitti.com, providing sentiency

According to KPMG adviser Rachel Marbus privacy is alive and well and everybody claiming otherwise is wrong. Here’s why:

• naysayers are only looking at ‘informational privacy’ rather than the entire spectrum of privacy rights. Unfortunately she does have to make use of metaphors from the Stone Age but yes, some snail mail is still not being read (although snail mail does undergo security scans and address information of both sender and receiver is being kept in some cases. She may have forgotten to do some fact checking on that one);
• she argues that one’s bedroom is still private as is the integrity of one’s body, referring to the fact that employers are not conducting medical checks themselves nor posting results online. Again an argument that is only partially correct. Internet users are posting their private life, love life and sexual escapades online (at the expense of their jobs) and there is much concern regarding the security of Electronic Patient Records, especially because the private sector is leading the way in this regard, separately from any government oversight. Meanwhile, videos of TSA pat-downs and body scans are finding their way online…
• she argues that using the right and freedom to post information about one’s private life online does not take away the fundamental right to privacy. That’s absolutely true, but it does – to a great extent – render it useless to call upon one’s right to privacy. Sure, others will confirm that one has such a right, but meanwhile there’s nothing that anyone can do to have that right remedy any situation damaging to one’s privacy.
• she argues that a lot of people post fake information about themselves online, probably arguing that as such, their “real” private information remains intact. Time and again she argues that naysayers have not conducted scientific research to validate their claims, but it appears that Rachel is doing or not doing the exact same thing. If it were true that some people post fake information online, then people close to those individuals – like employers – could actually identify that information as being false. How would that influence a person’s credibility? Would the employer feel that his employee is apparently hiding something? Would this motivate the employer to find out the truth?
• Finally, she obliterates any possibility to have a genuine discussion about whether or not privacy is still alive as she argues that there’s no proper definition of privacy anyway. Well if that were true I guess everybody can be right and everybody can be wrong, right Rachel?

Rachel has proven however that her personal interpretation of (the right to) privacy has remained intact and very much alive.

Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/opinie/109882/privacy-dood–wat-een-onzin–opinie-.html

In 2003 however, she had chosen to prove the exact opposite. At that time she wrote an article in the Dutch magazine Privacy and Information, showing how easy it was too:

• find home addresses of Dutch celebrities, as well as their phone numbers via dedicated sites belonging to businesses or individual internet users which keep, leak or reverse engineer relevant data (she made a plea for action against these sites by the Dutch Data Protection Authority)
• find personal details of Dutch celebrities via badly secured WHOIS databases, for example the one owned by SIDN.nl at the time, which was also leaking private mobile phone numbers which ended up in news groups.

In those days, she was already aware of the many risks to one’s privacy and was trying to remedy that situation. Perhaps it’s the current state of affairs that made her drop the “informational privacy issue” and focus on those areas where privacy remains intact – albeit partially – even though that’s not where the true and most relevant dangers are lurking in these modern times…

Dutch language article:
http://www2.internl.net/nieuws/nieuwsbrief/archief/2003/06/5.it