Privacy is just an illusion

Wherein I link to another data point proving that Enemy of the State was a documentary.

Tom Owad datamines every Amazon wishlist, analyzes your reading habits, and does a bit of address matching:

1DBHU3OCV72ZW is the wishlist owner's unique Amazon identification number. I made up the one you see here. By directing wget only to download pages at urls similar to this one, and by incrementing the search page from 1 to 10,400, it is possible to download all 260,000 wishlists without user intervention. Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.

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It is possible for users to associate a shipping address with their wishlists, so that others can order them gifts. Though the full address is hidden, city and state remain visible. I already have first and last name. With this information, I can do a Yahoo People Search to obtain an exact street address and phone number. Viewing the wishlists that contained Apple I Replica Creation, I found that all four provided the user's city and state. Of these four, one was a common name that produced multiple hits in his town, two were unlisted (although one of them was in the Intelius database which I opted not to pay for), and the final individual was present on Yahoo People. So I sent him a signed copy and thanked him for his interest.

Thanks to Google Maps (and many similar services) a street address is all we need to get a satellite image of a person's home. Tempted as I was to provide satellite images of the homes of the search subjects, it just seemed a bit extreme even for this article. Instead, I opted only to pinpoint the centers of the towns in which they live. So at least you'll know that there's somebody in your community reading Critical Thinking or some other dangerous text.

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All the tools used in this project are standard and free. The services, likewise, are all free. The technical skills required to implement this project are well within the abilities of anybody who has done any programming. The network connection used to download these files was a standard home DSL connection. The computer that processed the data was a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4. The operating system is Mac OS X 10.4, though everything could have been done just as easily with Linux (and probably with Windows). Not a penny was spent in the writing of this article, just 30 hours of time.

This is what's possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon's entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an "authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.

On a final note, the FBI is now hiring computer scientists to implement a project that sounds very similar to what I just did...

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@ Boing Boing; also mentioned by Bruce Schneier