The New York Times, January 6, 1997, p. D5.

   As the Web Expands, So Do Surveillance Tools

   By Matthew Hawn


   A few years ago, when the World Wide Web was new, the
   voyeuristic urges of Internet users had to be satisfied
   through the lenses of cheap digital cameras, set up to
   shoot grainy black-and-white pictures of mundane objects,
   updated every couple of minutes and transferred to a Web
   page.

   An early favorite was the coffeepot in the computer lab at
   Cambridge University (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/
   coffee.html).

   Let's just say that the results weren't exactly Hitchcock's
   "Rear Window." Seen one coffeepot wired to the Net, you've
   seen them all.

   But Web voyeurism has evolved, and then some. Take
   McKinley's Magellan search engine, which recently added a
   feature to its site. Every 20 seconds, the Magellan Voyeur
   page (http://voyeur.mckinley.com/voyeur.cgi) gives a random
   sampling of keywords that other visitors to the site are
   requesting from the Magellan search engine. Click on these
   links and you can see the results of someone else's
   searches.

   Though it would be technically possible to identify many of
   the searchers by domain name and even E-mail address,
   Magellan Voyeur does not. Good thing for them, too. A few
   minutes here and it is obvious what is really driving
   Internet traffic these days: sex, Star Trek cosmology and
   the urge to search for one's own name.

   Thanks to the open nature of the Net, there is not much
   data that you cannot transform into a personal surveillance
   tool. This can be seen in full effect at Deja News
   (http://www.dejanews.com), a site that has catalogued and
   indexed more than 15,000 Usenet news groups -- the
   Internet's bulletin board -- since 1995. One feature of the
   site is a usage profile of each person who posts messages
   on Usenet.

   For instance, a search for Tim May, a highly regarded
   privacy and cryptography advocate, someone who might be
   expected to be serious about his privacy, shows that Mr.
   May has posted 527 messages to Usenet in the last year and
   a half. Deja News gives links to all of Mr. May's postings
   to 32 different news groups like the Cypherpunk mailing
   list, a beer news group and a fan group for Debbie
   Reynolds. No one ever said that Usenet was a private way to
   exchange information, but it can still be shocking to see
   one's own postings indexed and sorted by frequency and
   topic.

   When a reporter reached Mr. May (Deja News provided his
   phone number and E-mail address), he was less shocked than
   bemused. Posting to the Net is "essentially like ranting in
   a public park," he said, adding that people should get used
   to the idea that just about anyone (like potential
   employers) can browse these public archives for one's past
   postings.

   "It's really going to be hard to force people to unremember
   these public utterances," he said. "You just can't force
   people to take this information off their machines."

   Now before anyone gets too shocked and righteous about the
   fact that someone is watching and indexing Internet
   bulletin boards, it should be remembered that nothing on
   the Net is all that private. As the pulse of the Web flows
   through the network's veins, it is possible for just about
   every machine it passes through to record some of those
   vital signs -- an electrocardiogram of mouse clicks and
   keystrokes.

   Mostly, people rely on privacy by obscurity, hoping that
   the sheer volume of data that flows over the Net each day
   will keep browsing anonymous. But a lot of people have an
   interest in what others browse, and they see the
   information stored by Web site computers as pure gold.

   The current wisdom in Net economics is that most World Wide
   Web sites will pay for themselves by providing valuable
   demographic data that marketers can, and no doubt will, use
   to narrowly aim personalized advertising at consumers.

   While information enthusiasts look forward to customized
   Web services that tailor information to their personal
   interests, this can't happen without collected statistics
   on browsing habits. You might like to watch but are you
   ready to be watched?

   [End]