Don’t talk too loud I have a hangover, and possibly your bank details

Take a moment to pic­ture the scene. We’re aboard a train, tra­vers­ing the Eng­lish coun­tryside between Birm­ing­ham and Bris­tol. It’s a glor­i­ous Sunday after­noon. I’m hun­gover. I have been sleep­ing on and off since Leeds, much to the annoy­ance of my trav­el­ing com­pan­ion Chris.

About an hour prior to now, four young lads joined the car­riage. They’re polite and chat amongst each other for a half hour or so before run­ning out of energy and fall­ing asleep. From catch­ing bits of their con­ver­sa­tion I gather they’re Mar­ines, on their way back to Taunton. They’ve clearly had a big night out too. The car­riage falls quiet once again.

I awake a short time later to the tones of a well spoken, if slightly loud girl in her twen­ties con­vers­ing on her phone via bluetooth to her Friend. No harm in that what so ever, apart from maybe the volume. This con­ver­sa­tion how­ever soon escal­ates into a full blown out-pouring about her per­sonal life. Her voice is the only real sound to be heard for the next hour.

We leave the train in Bris­tol know­ing everything about this girl’s week­end. I’m glad for her sake she wasn’t mak­ing a pay­ment over the phone or a lot of trav­el­lers might well have had a shop­ping spree at her expense.

So what am I get­ting at here?

It dawned on me a while later that this girl had clearly felt OK talk­ing open­ing about her affairs in earshot of the strangers around her. She’d assessed the level of pri­vacy and amount of dis­clos­ure on a sub-conscious level, and filtered what she should and should not say in a pub­lic set­ting (assum­ing she wasn’t a sociopath). In its very essence this is an example of a self-regulated, social pri­vacy set­ting. You know, the kind that exists on that “book­face” site. In this case, with the pri­vacy levels at an all time low, dis­cov­er­able by anyone.

I was left won­der­ing some­what if she’d provide this much dis­clos­ure in an online set­ting, where things are of a more per­man­ent nature. They’re indexed, logged, cached and dis­cov­er­able. You’re never totally in con­trol of who accesses what. In his book “The Art of Decep­tion”, Kevin Mit­nick tells us.

In real­ity pen­et­rat­ing a company’s [or an individual’s] secur­ity often starts with the bad guy obtain­ing some piece of inform­a­tion or some doc­u­ment that seems so inno­cent, so every­day and unim­port­ant, that most people in the organ­iz­a­tion wouldn’t see any reason why the item should be pro­tec­ted and restricted

Put simply, it’s no longer enough to rely on sites and soft­ware to con­trol your pri­vacy for you. They’ll fail you time and time again. If you want some­thing to remain private, don’t put it online.