Who Has Access?

Public vs. Private Domain

While the Internet is generally considered to be in the public domain, it is nonetheless, much more public than people are comfortable with when considering the public dissemination of databases containing personal information. While it is perfectly acceptable to be able to look up a person's social security record by going through a sheaf of paperwork and digging through county records in some dusty basement, it is another thing altogether to have it available at the fingertips of somebody who does not have any reason to other than sheer nosiness and boredom. Never before has personal information been available with so little hassle.

This is raising all sorts of concern as shown by the recent furor over the 11 day period when the Lexis-Nexis database reportedly made available information such as Social Security Number and mother's maiden name available to anyone with a credit card. While the report was overblown, it did make people open their eyes to the sheer volume of information about them that can be found if one knows the right resources to search. Proponents of online databases claim that the information is just as much in the public domain as it ever was, but this is clearly not the case. Databases of sensitive personal information may have been accessible before, but not nearly as casually or with so little control of who sees this information. Many sites require no verification of identity whatsoever before allowing access to its database.

Information Piracy

Another issue closely related is that of the security of information passed through the Internet. There is very little guarantee of security on the Internet. When submitting such sensitive material as credit card numbers across the Internet, it is all to easy for somebody else to interrupt the information in transit and make a copy of it. Before the advent of Internet commerce, there was not nearly as much concern over whether your application for the magazine subscription was being stopped in transit, without the postal service's knowledge by someone collecting credit card numbers. On the Internet, however, this is a blatant reality. It is all too common to hear stories of people collecting hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers simply by lurking on an unsecured or hacked submit path for such information.

Even after it is safely entered into the services database, there are still ways for people to steal the entire collection of credit card numbers, by hacking into the system since to a certain extent, the database has to be online to correlate with client requests. Not only is the information potentially piratable, it is also much, much less bothersome to do than trying to actually break into the companies' offices and making off with crates of papers. Information can be copied with almost no trail, and although this is not that frequent an occurrence with the security safeguards now in place, it is certainly another issue that no one had thought of until databases were made so accessible to the public.

Public Concern

Underlying concerns of both public domain accessiblity and piracy of sensitive personal information, is the public's perception of these problems. In many recent surveys, it has been shown that the main concern of people thinking of getting on the Internet is not cost, offensive materials, censorship, or spam, but rather privacy concerns, and fear over the extent that their personal information and activities on the Internet can be traced and collected into large databases for sale. Even though most people are not particularly well informed of the issues involved and the means of protecting themselves, the majority of people surveyed viewed the threat to privacy as a concern serious enough to affect the ways in which they used the Internet.

Very few people show much faith in the use of credit cards on the Internet, and many people habitually enter false information when asked to in registration forms. These are merely symptoms of the level of paranoia, whether it is justified or not, with which this situation is viewed. Making databases of collected information accessible online raises visibility of the issues involved, but it also serves to heighten the fear many feel towards the collection of personal information since the news stories that break about online databases tend to concern abuse of the information collected, but do little to defuse the panic caused. While proponents of online services may have a case as far as utility is concerned, the reality is that people do not feel safe having their information accessible online, no matter how much security the services claim to use.