The Digital Age:A series of mishaps this year has revealed the dangerously cavalier manner in which personal data is handled, writes Karlin Lillington
Personal privacy was not a winner in 2007. It was a year in which ordinary people had sensitive personal data shuttled hither and yon, mostly without their awareness. Only very occasionally do stories hit the headlines that reveal the cavalier way in which private information is handled - and mishandled - by those to whom users entrust it.
In a digital age, both gathering and transferring data is easy. When we use them - as most of us do from morning to night - electronic devices from mobile phones to computers leave readable footprints of where we were and what we were doing. That exposes us, and intimate details of our daily activities and interests, in heretofore unthinkable ways, and produces a data trail of interest to many, from governments to law enforcement to advertisers and cybercrooks.
As a result we have mostly lost a private life we once took for granted. Just after the turn of the last century, when Leopold Bloom made his fictional perambulations through a bustling Dublin on a summer's day, the only record of his passing would have been taken by acquaintances who saw him here and there during the day.
Retrace those steps in 2007 on a Joyce literary walk, and your mobile phone - even if you never once use it - will produce an electronic trail as it regularly verifies its position against sets of mobile phone masts as you walk the streets. That information will go into computers at your mobile provider, and will in turn be stored for the government for the next three years - on the off chance that you might commit a crime.
At work, as you send and receive e-mails, those too almost certainly are being sent, with full contents, into a company repository. When you stop at Tesco on the way home and swipe your Club Card when making your purchase, your purchase information enters another database. Renewing your car insurance? Another database. Collecting a prescription? Into a database.
At home, if you decide to spend a little time on the web, every Google search goes into a database. Click on a banner ad? That information is filed about you. Visit 15 websites before you go make dinner? They are all recorded and soon, that information too will be filed away for the next three years by the government, as will the details about your e-mail send and receive records.
Think those details are secure, and accessible only to those who have a specific need for them? Well, no. The past month has seen the entire British nation's most intimate details and medical records go missing because inept civil servants sent this sensitive information through the internal post.
Weeks later, we learned more British data have gone missing when a supposedly secure storage facility in the US lost a harddrive.
In the US, vast swathes of information are stored, in the name of the fight against terrorism, with the Bush administration demanding everything from phone call records to lists of the terms people search for on internet search sites. Meanwhile, the US Congress is debating whether to continue to permit the government to conduct warrantless eavesdropping of communication technologies, an activity normally reserved for oppressive anti-democratic national regimes.
Back on our own home turf, the Data Protection Commissioner revealed in summer that gardaí had made more than 10,000 requests for call records already under Ireland's totally unrestricted call data retention legislation introduced the year before - legislation that former minister for justice Michael McDowell had pledged would only ever be used in the most serious crime and terrorism cases.
And it isn't just governments losing and abusing citizen data. It's big business, too. Regular stories crop up of consumers' credit card and personal details useful for identity thieves, being lost from poorly secured websites to hackers increasingly working for large criminal gangs. Data taken in by business can be used in more deliberate and odious ways. Last month, we saw the founder and the chief executive of Yahoo apologise during a US Congressional hearing to the mother and wife of a jailed Chinese dissident, incarcerated for 10 years because Yahoo handed over private details and personal e-mails of the man - who used a Yahoo e-mail account - to Chinese authorities.
In the same part of the world, Google has been rightly and roundly criticised for willingly censoring its search returns for Chinese viewers.
Yet the same company is asking US and EU authorities to permit it to merge with the world's biggest internet advertising company, Doubleclick, a step strongly opposed by privacy advocates because of the ability to merge the search data of individuals gathered by the world's largest search company with Doubleclick tracking technologies that record the websites they visit. Such a merger would offer unprecedented ability to peer into the online activities of individuals.
Most people remain oblivious or indifferent to how their personal data is used. You only have to look at the amount of personal information people load on to social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook.
The issue seems to be the intangible format of our information - we don't see or touch or feel our digital information as it is silently transferred across networks and into unknown hands.
Citizens need to be more aware - and vocal - about such activities. What you cannot see can hurt you.
