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Where's the Private in Private Parts?

By Greg Coyle

Let's face it, we've all got something to hide. A modest growing operation in the basement (for medical use, of course), a taste for games of chance, a hopeless love of distilled spirits, a regrettable tattoo, a short stay at a "retreat" somewhere in upstate New York - we all have secrets we've squirreled away from prying eyes. We're a nation of if not liars, at least practiced magicians. There's even a kind of pride in how well one can exercise and then obscure their more suspect habits and interests. The problem is, we're endlessly curious about both our neighbors' peccadilloes and their methods for concealing them. Only by comparing our taste for, say, topless housecleaners to the short prison stay of the guy next door for exhibitionism can we really gauge our own depravity. And only by studying how they get away with it can we improve our own techniques. Like it or not, freedom begets failures of character just as often as it does human ingenuity.

Given this, should anyone be surprised that nourishing itself on the underside of the Internet is the same, unresolvable impulse to peek through another's window? If the guy with the blow up doll doesn't know we know he has a blow up doll, we enjoy a kind of power over him. TV evangelists have been using this tactic for years. Audience members fill out cards detailing bits and pieces of their life and then the soothsayers in their Armani suits, pinkie rings and Las Vegas toupees divine this guy's impotence and that one's "problem" with food. The aim is obviously not salvation, but the timeless art of separating a fool from his money. Under the thumb of this influence, these poor saps can be more easily manipulated into opening their checkbook and underwriting the preacher's predilection for cross-dressing prostitutes and Italian shoes.

Information is power. Gamblers, con artists and marketing shills all know this. So does the CIA. So do the killers in most slasher movies ("I Know What You Did Last Summer"...?). They lurk about at the treeline just beyond the old lake cabin, secretly watching, determining the most appropriate way to off each of the beer-guzzling, hormone-fueled teenagers inside. Now, operating on the Internet is not likely to result in death (save for those who try it in the bathtub), but others' accessibility to our information, both sensitive and benign, can have any number of varying repercussions. Use your credit card online, especially on an unsecured site, and you could find you next bill highlighting the purchase of a Russian bride or a small arsenal of semiautomatic guns and ammo. Pilfered as well is all your vital demographic information, e.g., age, geographic location, buying history, Internet "habits," etc. This information is added to enormous databases and then made available to marketers of all description. (In a recent poll conducted by Clickz.com, 76 percent of online marketers and publishers admitted to collecting user information.)

But these are familiar evils. There are new ones every day. It's just like with the Superfriends. When a new superhero joined the team, like, say, Apache Chief, the Legion of Doom would add someone like Solomon Grundy to even it out. Similarly, as more people turn to the Internet, for pleasure, business and communication, its evil side grows commensurately. As the technology expands, so too does the preoccupation with meddling in others people's business. But then it's always been that way. Consider, for example, how many Italian bedrooms were peered into the week after Galileo put a couple of mirrors together to make the first telescope?

Still, most thinking people have never accepted as appropriate behavior tapping someone's phone, reading their mail or taking Polaroids from the branches of a tree outside the house on Lincoln Street where these twins live, both blonde flight attendants who look like the girl from "Dharma and Greg" and...Washington D.C., of course, doesn't count.

Such invasions are, nevertheless, becoming common, even accepted, practice. Businesses are turning to such online companies as DigDirt, Advanced Research and Buckley & Associates to uncover information about their employees. Meanwhile, companies like Arlington, Va.'s SRA International are developing artificial intelligence technology designed to allow companies to recognize, flag and report employee email containing anything deemed objectionable. It could be potty mouth stuff, discussions of colorful digestive troubles, pictures of African tribe members with elephantiasis. But it could also include more slippery subject matter, like rumors, about the boss' "business" trips to the Florida keys, the half-dressed shenanigans in the copy room at the Christmas party or the bottle of Cutty Sark in so-and-so's bottom desk drawer.

If that wasn't enough, Microsoft recently launched a promotional site. TerraServer allows visitors access and control of USGS and SPIN-2 satellite images of the U.S. and Europe. The technology allows views to zoom in to up to one-meter resolution on chosen locations. "Did you ever wonder what your neighborhood looked like from space...," read one of the software giant's come-ons. But fess up, our imaginations, as they are prone to do, slide immediately into the possibility of spying on people, preferably naked people. Bathroom windows, nude beaches, outdoor Playboy photo shoots, the alternatives are endless. Voyeurs are no longer content with professional, posed models. They want the secret, the invasive. Just visit VoyeurWeb if you don't believe me. And the truly diabolical? They, like TV evangelists, will find a way to make a buck from the information gathered.

So what's the upside to all this? Well, take some solace in the fact that thus it is, and thus shall it ever be. Answering the genius that imagined the Internet, and the skill that made it a working reality, is the same jealous, untrusting, conniving, ambitious side of us that has found a nefarious use for most every piece of technology. It's the same side of us that believed without a doubt that Jamie Summers' bionic hearing was worlds better than Steve Austin's super strength. The truth is there will always be certain employers that can't help themselves, who find it impossible not to dig into the private lives of their employees. And there will always be jealous husbands and peeping Toms. If the history of technology has taught us anything it's that as long as those folks exist there will be an industry in place to satisfy their wishes.

In the meantime, the best approach seems to be to treat the Internet like a department store dressing room - go ahead and enjoy finding that perfect ensemble, but assume all the while that someone is watching you check out your ass in the mirror.