Privacy Issues

February 15th, 2010 by admin

The MATRIX is dead but not forgotten.  Something as innocuous as People search seems to have blossomed into a potential Pandora’s Box.   A few years ago there are was a retired drug smuggler who invested his capital into database collection.  He realized there were a lot of databases out there for sale and so he began to collect them and then in 2005 he created a program called the MATRIX in an attempt to help find terrorists, by correlating data in his massive database.  It doesn’t sound like a bad idea if you are trying to catch bad guys, but there is definitely something that feels wrong about it. 

The MATRIX didn’t go far and lost government funding in the US, but the creator didn’t give up and now he has a new commercial product.  The major problem with this is how this private company goes about collecting data. Offering free use of its database technology to relevant municipal, state, and federal agencies, in exchange for access to their databases.   It takes People search to an entirely different level and that information once collected becomes available for sale to the general public.  I don’t think any of us have a problem with using information to locate friends or catch the bad guys, but its difficult to determine where to draw the line. 

The White pages have long been the database of choice for most people who are looking up information on someone, but now there is more competition in the marketplace than ever before.  There is People search, people finder, facebook, myspace, twitter, and many many other ways to look up information on someone by using whatever bits of information you might have, including name, city, email address, phone number, or even mobile number.  The advantages to such easily accesible data seem to outweigh the privacy issues for now and there doesn’t seem to be that much being done about paying to access databases with public records or even not so public records.   

So what’s next on the horizon?  People search is a wonderful tool and should be available to us for some time to come, but its not without its hazards.   I guess it’s just something to keep an eye on for now. 



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