About twenty years ago a data service – I forget which one – offered a set of compact disks for sale. It contained the names, phone numbers, addresses and demographic data for everyone in the United States. The product launch was drowned out by the howls of outrage from journalists and Congress. It was an unthinkable violation of privacy. It was Orwellian. The venture sank without a trace. For a while.

Ten years later David Brin wrote The Transparent Society making the case that secrets would soon be impossible to keep and that we shouldn’t even try. The Information Age would usher in an era where everyone’s life was on display. Governments would be models of transparency and openness. Corporations would throw open their records or pay through the nose for the privilege of keeping a few vital things confidential for a limited time. Privacy would be an outdated concept. A decade down the line he seems to be batting .500. While business and government have an increasingly broad view of what they can hide from the public the lives of the Little People are on display to an extent that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

Today? Ah, today is not at all like yesterday. We take it for granted that a few minutes or a few seconds plus a few dollars can extract anyone’s picture, phone numbers and address not to mention the most personal details of his or her life. People sign up for services which tell everyone in the world exactly where they are at all times. Friends of mine with Military Intelligence backgrounds describe how they used to agonize over photos in wallets, matchbooks and brands of cologne to try and piece together the outlines of a target’s contacts and associations. Today their subjects spend hours doing the work themselves with Facebook. Targeted advertising works so well that it’s killing traditional venues like printed newspapers. Twitter and Hotmail are free for the user because they are worth serious money to the real customers – advertisers.

In the last day or so I came across two very interesting takes on how much the world has changed. The BBC’s World Have Your Say featured a spirited worldwide discussion, also available as a downloadable podcast on how transparent our lives should be. My favorite security expert, the brilliant and very readable Bruce Schneier, wrote an excellent piece in the Japan Times. When you exchange information online it stays. Most data you think are private are only that way until someone else decides it’s worth something to share or sell them.

It’s not something most of us think about. We use credit cards. We tweet about whatever comes into our head and broadcast it. But it is very serious business which can have profound repercussions years later. The information we put out for the world to see is worth money to others. We should think about whether it’s worth something to us, how much we should value what we currently give away for free.

When people communicate, they want to believe that what they say or write is private. People take precautions every day to make sure information is shared only with the intended recipients.

Consider the example of people having a conversation in public. When you want to say something personal you will probably look around, lean in and either speak quietly. Sometimes you will hold your thought until you get to a more private location. You don’t want other people to know what you are saying.

The same should be true on the Internet. Most people don’t care if others know that they are going to go to a movie later that night. However, people often share personal financial, medical or legal information over the Internet.   They believe that these Internet conversations are private.  The reality is that much of the Internet is set up to gather your information to sell, spam or scam you. Recent estimates reported spam accounting for more than 90% of all email received.  What do you do to protect yourself? One way is to carefully understand the privacy policies of the websites you visit and see who owns your content. You will be surprised to find that in most cases you do not own what you write; often you don’t even own the content of your own emails.

While most companies don’t hire people to personally read your email, they do build computers to scan the content and sell that information to advertisers. These advertisements are specifically trying to exploit your personal information. Unfortunately, this often leads to serious issues such as spam and identity theft.

If a privacy policy is confusing it is often written that way by design. Many sites claim they don’t share their content with anyone, however between themselves and their subsidiaries, your information can spread over the Internet very quickly.

In addition to reviewing a privacy policy, a good way to tell that the company will exploit your privacy is by looking at their business model. If they have advertising on their site, advertising partners, or subsidiaries that have advertising, that is a telltale sign that they will in some way make money from your personal information.

You are the only person who controls what information you want to share. If you don’t want the world to know your legal, financial and medical history, be sure to carefully read the privacy policies and understand the true business model of the websites you visit.

We are excited to implement all the great suggestions from customers and visitors that we have received over the past year.  Some of the major differences that you will notice are the slide show and videos, a news scroll and of course our blog that you are reading now.

I’d like to take just a moment to describe a few of these new features. The first one is the slide show. Many people have asked us to tell them a little more about who we are and what the difference is between private email and common email. The slide show will explain that and much more.

Contained in the same area as our slide show is our video section. We will have weekly In The Know videos telling you about what is happening at PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as other topical videos that you see listed.  We will be updating these videos often, so check back and see what we’ve added. If you’ve created a video that you would like us to know about, just send a link to info@privacyharbor.com with your contact information and we’ll contact you if we add it to our video section.

Finally, we have this blog. We’ll share information about PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as privacy news that is most pertinent to private communications over the Internet. This section is built to be informative and interactive, that’s why we have it on our homepage. Please write to our blog to chat, ask about PrivacyHarbor.com or any privacy news that you come across. We look forward to hearing from you.

We are passionate about privacy and believe that your email communications should be private. Sign up for an account and tell your friends about us, so they too can take back their privacy with PrivacyHarbor.com.

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