The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [90]
Therefore, as long as social networking accounts are tied to one email address, it’s also remarkably easy to tie them to a particular person, learn that person’s name, and see what kind of hidden indiscretions that person may be engaging in, offline or online. The researchers, for example, found the profile of a married professor in his fifties who was also remarkably active on various dating sites. Similarly, activists who upload sensitive videos to YouTube thinking that no one could guess their real names from their usernames maybe under much greater risks if they use the same email address to access Facebook and the secret police learns what that email address is.
Once alerted to such vulnerabilities, many social networking sites slightly tweaked their operating procedures, making it hard to do such checks in bulk. Nevertheless, it’s still possible to find multiple online identities for individual emails through manual checking. This is not the kind of feature that is going to disappear soon, if only because it allows social networking sites to expand their user base.
Corporations are already taking advantage of the increasingly social nature of the Web. Hotels now use locations, dates, and usernames that appear on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp to triangulate a guest’s identity. If they find a likely match and the review happens to be positive, the review is added to a hotel’s guest preference records. If it’s negative, the travelers might be given a voucher to compensate for the inconvenience or, in the worst scenario, to be marked as “problem guests.” Barry Hurd, the CEO of Seattle-based 123 Social Media, a reputation management company that works with more than five hundred hotels, believes that “technology is evolving so fast that in the future, every hotel representative could have a toolbar on his or her computer that reveals everything about a guest at the click of a mouse—every review, guest preference and even the likelihood that you’ll be positively or negatively inclined toward your stay.”
Of course, hotels are not authoritarian governments—they won’t imprison guests in their rooms for expressing dissenting views—but if they can learn the real identities behind imaginary online nicknames, so can the secret police. Moreover, the corporate quest for de-anonymizing user identities can soon fuel a market in tools that can automate the process, and those tools can then be easily used in more ominous contexts. Intelligence agencies in the United States have already profited from data-gathering technology created on Wall Street. TextMiner, one such platform developed by Exegy, a firm that works with both intelligence agencies and Wall Street banks, can search through flight manifests, shipping schedules, and phone records as well as patterns that might form Social Security numbers or email accounts. “What was taking this one particular agency one hour to do, they can now do in one second,” says Ron Indeck, Exegy’s chief technology officer, in a phrase that sounds remarkably similar to the glee of the Chinese contractors at TRS Solutions. Thus, an entire year’s worth of news articles from one organization can be searched and organized in “a couple of seconds.” The private sector will surely continue churning out innovations that can benefit secret police everywhere. Without finding ways to block the transfer of such technologies to authoritarian states or, even more important,