Lessons of GMail: The Web Isn't Private

In case you don't spend way too much time reading the news, Google is launching a service called GMail -- a searchable email service that advertises that you never have to delete an email. The service has privacy advocates up in arms because they never delete your email, and they scan it to provide targeted ads. WHAT!?!? GOOGLE COULD READ MY EMAIL!?!? Well, technically, yes. But so could any service you use on the internet. It isn't new. The internet has never been anonymous.
I don't run my own website anymore. It's still up, but I never update it. Still, I know a lot about the people who visit it. And they can know pretty much anything they want to about me. Having a website was a good lesson for me in how the internet works, and why you're never anonymous online. This isn't meant to scare you, it's just to show you that the internet is a public place, not some private, anonymous entity, and hence why the ability of the company that provides you with email to read your email is pretty much along the same lines as the entire rest of the internet.

First, almost nobody actually runs their own website (although Google actually does, but they're pretty much an exception). I know I didn't. I had an account with a company called Dot5. Dot5 is what is called a hosting company. My website was stored on their computers. They were the ones people actually connected to. They actually know more about the people who visit my website than I do.

Hosting companies keep documents called server logs. The person who pays for the hosting service also gets a copy of the server logs. There's a lot of interesting information there. I have (or have easy access to) the following information about anybody who has ever visited my web site:
--Their IP Address, from which I can tell where they get their internet access from, what city they live in, and, if they were online at work or at school, who they work for or where they go to school.
--What operating system they use, what web browser they use, and even more little things like their screen resolution.
--Exactly what they read or saw on my web site and how long they spent reading it.
--What website they were looking at before they visited mine. If they came from a search engine, I know exactly what they were searching for. I also, thanks to something called a "whois database", which I will explain in a moment, know how to contact the person responsible for the website they were looking at. And, without exception, every site on the internet keeps these logs.

That's a lot of information, isn't it? So who exactly has all of that information? Well, honestly, nobody knows completely. We know that your Internet Service Provider has it. That means something because they have that information about every site you visit, as well as how to contact you. And my hosting company and their internet service provider also have it. And me. And, because of the way the internet works, probably dozens of other internet service providers, hosting companies, and DNS services in between. And odds are, in most of those places, the information goes into an archive somewhere. Very few things on the internet are ever deleted. If you need proof that nothing on the internet ever gets deleted, visit http://www.archive.org, affiliated with Amazon.com's Alexa Internet subsidiary, which, at regular intervals, makes and stores indefinitely a copy of every site on the internet.

The lack of privacy street runs both ways, of course. People who run websites aren't anonymous. It's impossible to run a web site anonymously. Of course, anybody who accesses your website can get your IP address, which as I explained above allows them to determine who your ISP is and what city you are in. The fact that the user and the website need each other's IP addresses isn't a suprise. Your computer and the website's computer have to be able to contact each other, and IP addresses are the way the internet (and pretty much every other network) do that. But more importantly, information about the people responsible for websites is stored for as long as the website exists on dozens of publicly accessible sites called "whois databases."

The information in whois databases include mundane things like how long the site has been around, and how long the owner has paid for it, who they bought the site from, and the web host that runs it. It also includes information (which is legally required to be correct) about the real identity of the person who runs the website, and how to contact them. Name, address, phone number, and email address.

This isn't just a formality either. The internet depends on having this information available. If something goes wrong with one site, it can cause problems all across the entire internet, and we have to know whose job it is to get it fixed.

Again, this isn't to scare you. The point is that you can't get that upset about violations of privacy on the internet. The internet is, was, and was designed to be indestructible and public.

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