Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan Read Free Book Online Page B

find a way around the IP tracking and other limitations. The twenty inquiries per day limitation is also frustrating to people who may want to search all the properties in a complex for perfectly legitimate reasons. However, the new system has struck reasonable balance between making information available to those who need it, while keeping it from the merely curious and the actively malicious.
    Governments are still struggling with idea of “public information.” The line is also blurring between governmental and privately gathered information, which are becoming mashed together into one big data cloud.
    Certain life events open normally private matters more fully to public scrutiny, and a divorce is an excellent example of how privacy protection can slip in the interest of public information. Those detailed and sometimes embarrassing lists of assets, chattels, claims, and counterclaims will become a matter of public record in most jurisdictions. 249
    Anyone willing to head to the musty basement of a courthouse can usually find out who got the house, the car, even the family pet. A nine-year-old Dalmatian hound was the subject of a $2M divorce-related claim involving a Calgary millionaire and his soon-to-be ex-wife. The full settlement details were not made public but we do know that Dad got the dog and the press quoted his stepson as saying “my mom is very wealthy now.” 250
    If records are digitized, they are probably available from a data broker like Little Rock, Arkansas-based Acxiom, which, according to the New York Times , has data on “about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.” 251
    Acxiom sucks in data and uses PersonicX, a data-based classification system worthy of the NSA. It pops you into one of seventy socioeconomic clusters and life stage groups with cute if somewhat judgmental names like “Mature Rustics,” “Resolute Renters,” and “Midtown Minivanners.” 252 Acxiom also offers a “Race model.”
    The company can provide data on people who are smokers, gamblers, dieters, etc. They often glean this information using self-reported surveys on sites that offer promotional deals to people willing to complete them.
    Completing a survey on one of these sites can sometimes be a humbling experience, as you get “screened out” for reasons of age, income, or some other unknown. But even if you didn’t win a prize or earn some of their fake currency, the information you give up in these surveys is being filed, exchanged, sold, and used to target you whenever possible.

Pet Creep
    I tell this tale with a bit of trepidation because it was imparted to me by a gun-toting officer of the law in a place of liquid refreshment. However, I have every reason to believe it is 100% true and it illustrates an important point of technocreepiness: Give somebody physical access to your technology, even briefly, and they can effectively “own” you. I also know that the person who told me this story would never be allowed to put it in writing, so here goes.
    My Federal law enforcement buddies needed to do a “black bag job” on a certain organized crime figure’s house. This involved entering the premises to install a piece of spyware on the suspect’s ­computer. So they sent him a nice letter from a local restaurant inviting the whole family to a complimentary meal, reservations required, of course.
    On the night of this expedition, once the family was gone, my Fed friends opened the front door and were confronted with the family pets. A dog and a cat.
    The dog was no problem, or at least “nothing that a nice juicy steak wouldn’t take care of.” They had come prepared with fresh meat. The family cat, on the other hand, dashed out the front door. Several burly Federal agents were now dispatched to hunt down the animal, staying in