2026-03-03 21:43 UTC
@suzannealdrich @paul_ipv6 @briankrebs @SteveBellovin My wife took a small step in fighting back - she has a set of false names, dates, and places that she uses. A few years back the WSJ did a front page article on her doing this.
I have a copy of the 1974 HEW report on computers/privacy. It's concerns about data linking have come true - and have even exceeded what was imagined. (And there was no lack of imagination - for instance Lance Hoffman's article from that era about pulling personally identifiable information from seemingly anonymous databases.)
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@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange 2026-03-03 21:52
@karlauerbach @suzannealdrich @paul_ipv6 @briankrebs So much was known 60 years ago. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/talks/vassar-privacy.pdf summarizes some of it; some of my legal writing has citations to even more sources. The first privacy law in the modern world was in Hesse, in 1970; the phrase "data shadow" was coined no later than 1973 by Kerstin Anér, a member of the Swedish parliament. We should not be where we are today! (Credit reports, though, go way back, and originally consisted of gossip collected from servants about their employers.)