An Epidemic of Snooping

Travoltus writes "Privacy advocates are frequently confronted with the rhetorical question, 'If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have a good reason to worry about losing your privacy, right?' This AP story uncovers a vast, distributed, decentralized epidemic of snooping into databases of personal information by workers at major utilities, the IRS, and other large organizations. In a number of cases these incidents have led to real harm. One striking example involves now ex-Mayor of Milwaukee Marvin Pratt, who had a pattern of being late paying his heating bills. This fact was leaked to the media by a utility worker and may have led to Pratt's losing a bid for re-election. As one can imagine, the harm becomes much greater when this same snooping is done by Government officials to deal with political enemies, or by corporations to uncover whistleblowers."

Comments

Re:Q&A

[statusbar]

I don't have anything to hide! I live at #4-1131 burnaby st in vancouver, I own 3 macintosh computers, 2 linux servers, a video camera, MIDI equipment, a large screen plasma tv, a ps3 and an xbox 360.

I have loads of dvd's and I blog about all of my favourites.

On wednesday I will be going on a trip for a few weeks and although I don't have an alarm system I have a pet cat. I'm getting my friend Kim to come over every day at noon to feed my cat.

I am a trusting person and I'm SURE that no one would take advantage of this information and break in and rob me while I'm gone!

Once again, I have nothing to hide!

--jeffk++

Re:Q&A

[Anonymous Coward]

You and your cat can goto hell! I'm not going to risk my life after you post this information to all these potential burglars and rapists!
-Kim