Our Future Privacy Risks

An anonymous comment in my previous article (Don't Block Our Torrents!) pointed out a p2p application, Share (P2P). There are many privacy concerns in the world today. Information is collected constantly about us. At our workplaces. At the stores we go to. And even online. Constantly, we are giving out information that is completely out of our control. The world's technology is integrating, and access to information is becoming global. This article examines risks to our privacy and concerns for the future. But first, a history of some anonymous file sharing applications that got me started on this topic.

It seems to have started at first with Winny. It was created by a Japanese man as an anonymous way to transfer files over a peer to peer network. It is non-centralized and supports swarm downloading (pretty much the norm in p2p apps now a days). The creator of Winny had his home raided and the source code confiscated. On May 10th, 2004, he was arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation. After the halt on development of Winny, Share was created by an anonymous Japanese engineer to carry on with what Winny started. Winny and Share seem to work by keeping ip addresses secret and encrypting files before transfer, and then decrypting them upon successful file transfer.

Although there have been a few arrests with Winny, the police did not catch them entirely through the file-sharing network. It was not a security breach, but instead a system of elimination. The police obtained ip addresses through an integrated forum, after which they blocked access to all ip addresses except the ones obtained, allowing them to verify the sharing of files from the specific ip addresses.

The programs aren't too useful in many places outside of Japan as most of the rest of the world is still lacking in internet speed in comparison to Japan. Share limits download and upload speeds to a minimum of 50 KB/s. I expect encryption file sharing applications will gain popularity as the rest of the world's internet speeds increase.

There are arguments that anonymous file sharing applications only exist for the reason of sharing illegal files. I am a believer in privacy, and don't believe this to be true. I think people have a right to protect their identity online (as the internet wasn't built for privacy). With an ip address and an extensive network with no privacy, I believe it would be possible for people to keep tabs on others as to what their interests, jobs, and hobbies may be. Programs like this may become important in the future as our privacy is scraped away by the ever increasing online authorities watching our every moves. Another reason this mass documenting could be threatening for our privacy is because information is power. Marketers and business people would love to assemble such a network for these reasons. I think we should have the right to choose the knowledge we allow people to have about us, and the right to safeguard it.

Oh, and in a very funny turn of events, the Okayama Prefectural Police Force had a large leak of data over Winny. Data of over 1500 investigations was leaked, and is apparently the largest amount of information held by Japanese police to have ever been leaked. How ironic considering these police forces chase and track p2p users for their "crimes". The bad side, and another point proving that the archival and tracking of our private information is a threat to our privacy, is that the information included sensitive data, such as the names of sex crime victims!

I'm curious as to what other people think about our privacy in the future, and if we have a right to safeguard it. I must say as well, that an ip database profiling people of the internet would be quite a feat, as there are a variety of ip naming systems, with static and dynamic. I still believe it to be possible to accurately pin-point someones identity even with dynamic ip addresses if a time-stamp system is used (doesn't take much to integrate that, most programming languages have that built in). Internet service providers would have the proper information of which time a person had that specific ip address for police, while it wouldn't be as important for marketers. And although there is a large usage of dynamic ip address naming systems, I think we'll start to see this diminish as the practical use of home servers increases and people start to demand static ip's. Marketers already use things such as Google's Hot Trends, showing a list of the most popular search queries.

Our privacy is slowly eroding whether we acknowledge it or not.


The information for this article was obtained from these Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny
And a special thanks goes out to the anonymous poster who pointed me towards these amazing applications, working to safeguard our privacy (whether people think so or not).