You can run ... but don't bother to hide

RIP "Privacy" - Finally declared dead during the first couple decades after the second millenium.

Very few people are unaware that their privacy is continuously eroding. If you are young enough, you might not even be aware of the concept of privacy, having publicly spilled your entire social and behavioral record across the likes of MySpace, Facebook and other social networks.

Social Security numbers and other government and military records, bank and credit card transactions, corporate databases of buying behavior, public databases scanned by search services, cellphone records and the trail we innocently leave on the social networks are getting close to guaranteeing we can never completely escape observation. A friend may simply tag a photo of you in an online album and your privacy is compromised. Even knowing someone who is on a social network may, in time, constitute a form of public exposure.

Facial recognition software has existed for a long time, but combining that with internet search is a new thing. A benign example of that is the functionality built into Google's Picasa and Picasaweb offerings that allows you to find most of the photographs in a collection that include a particular person's face. In playing with Picasa, I found it could recognize faces that weren't much more than a few pixels in a distant background. Those same capabilities are being turned toward the web so that any image of you can be found.

Truth in Advertising: several of these photos were manually tagged.

One of the latest services being tested by Google Labs is social network searching. The demo video below explains how it works:



I've long given up on the idea of ever disappearing, so much so that I've already disclosed how to find me: just look in the Yukon for someone who looks like me going by the moniker of "Lucky Pierre." Say "Hello," but don't use my real name. OK?

If you want to know more on the challenges of "getting lost," here are two recent articles from Wired Magazine:

Gone Forever: What does it really take to disappear?

How To Disappear From the Corporate Databases: Abandon Everything You Love