Wired on Friday: There's times when mixing the internet with a perfectly innocuous real world indulgence is a little like tossing a lit match to a perfectly stable lake of petroleum. Even our most harmless pastimes can take on a more sinister dimension.
Take personality quizzes. When there were confined to the glossy magazines, the "quick personality test", wherein you discover "Are You Good in Bed or Bad at Heart?", or answer the question "Are You Kissable?", or uncover whether "You Have What it Takes to Be the Boss", seemed a perfectly reasonable - and eminently ghettoised - distraction.
Online, the same quizzes have a far more powerful, crack-cocainish allure. You can find sites that hold thousands of these little quizzes, holding them all out for the casual bypasser to fill in like scientologists at an airport. Thousands of hours are wasted by otherwise reasonable individuals, filling and refilling in these multiple-choice tempters.
Really though, apart from the unbearable light-heartedness of these tests, and the man-years in time wasted, what is the harm? No-one is shooting anyone else at dawn, no cluster bombs have been deployed, and no-one is hurt beyond the damage due to grimacing on discovering another person proudly declaring on their website that they are "Rik from the Young Ones" or "The Extrovert Intuitive Thinking Perceiving Type".
And, as with so many net matters, it gets a great deal worse when you finally cross the internet's Rubicon, and start contributing to the web yourself. Web blogs or personal home pages are fill of little scout badges, cut and pasted from quiz sites, declaring that their owner has been deemed to be "Rik From The Young Ones" or "A Coy Pre-Raphaelite".
And then you realise that all that personal information can have a use.
Right now, that use is perfectly benign. Take a site like OKCupid.com, which by turns offers just those addictive tests, compiling a quaint little summary of what kind of person you are (or claim to be).
A side effect of all that data, stored and munged by the clever mathematics of OkCupid's programmers, provides another service: matchmaking.
In one of those quizzes, you mentioned that you loved tidiness and perhaps wanted a mate who knew how to ride a horse. In someone else's quiz selection, they mention that they love horse-riding, and messiness drives them crazy. You've both mentioned you live in Chicago. Perhaps you'd like to meet?
Result: a match made in heaven. Or at least made out of thousands of matching data points, each of which was not only freely given, but the supplier actually rather enjoyed providing the raw data.
While sites like OKCupid.com trade on their reputation as providers of innocent fun, it's important to think of the other side of this data collection. People seem remarkably content to hand over the most personal details of their lives to a machine, even though a computer is the last thing in the world to keep a secret. One of the most commonly filled out descriptions on matchmaking sites, for instance, is sexual orientation, an attribute that many prefer to keep confidential. Other personal details that quiz sites would collect would be your past drug use and your sexual history.
Now, I don't believe that quiz sites would explicitly sell or pass on such personal data. But they don't have to for this to be a dangerous development. Increasingly, with the Patriot Act in the US, and similar developments in the EU, law enforcement is gaining more powers to expose and scan such privately-held databases. Recently it was revealed that, in a search for potential terrorists in Las Vegas after a tip-off, almost a million hotel records were seized and examined by the FBI, building up a real-time census of every visitor to that city.
What happens when the same invasive practices start poring through our records online?
A friend of mine, writing his personal details on his home page, once commented that while he suspected the rise of computers would bring about a sinister Big Brother database, he never suspected he'd be writing his own entry. It may be that, as we merrily answer the most revealing questions online, that is exactly what we are constructing for ourselves. The traditional response to this disturbing future is to blame the victims. If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone. But the abilities of any of us to gauge when we are revealing a secret, and to whom, and how it will come back to us in the future is fast diminishing.
Quiz-filling, really, is a passion mostly of teenagers and young adults. It's a way of examining and elaborating on your own growing personality. People of that age won't be aware - can't be aware - of every single ramification of what they do. But what happens in 20 years' time, when the first generation of politicians who grew up on the web take power. What will be the temptation then for investigative journalists and political opponents to sort through these childish records?
Our tame juvenilia scandals of politicians gurning at college events will have nothing on the elaborate picture of embarrassing revelations that is being built up here.
Perhaps all of us will live our lives more in public then. Perhaps we will have a more forgiving nature, delivered to us courtesy of our own embarrassing personal revelations, provided by leaking databases and over sharing web sessions. Or perhaps our diminishing privacy will lead to a new puritanism, where only those who invest the most effort into keeping their past secret will have a permanent societal advantage over those who, as the internet encourages us to do, share and share alike.
