I know who you are.

Yes. You. That's right. The person reading this right now. I know who you are......... and wouldn't you like a new shirt? The one you have on is looking kind of dated.

Okay, so I don't really know who you are (and I'm sure your shirt is very nice). But I do know your IP address, and from that can likely find out where you live or work, your demographics, and very possibly your name, address, phone number, social security number, and a few other lovely tidbits. I mention this after reading endlessly about identity theft, and more recently, reading this article in Wired, talking about Google's decision to blacklist C-Net after one of their reporters use.....you guessed it....Google, to discover some personal information about Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. Apparently this displeased Mr. Schmidt, and he ordered that no one at Google should talk to C-Net until mid 2006. The irony too juicy to ignore, the story quickly became national news.

Which all brings me to by greater point, privacy, or rather, the lack their of. In my own line of work, I often hear people ask, "how can we find out if our employees are blogging?" or "how can we tell if our employees are saying something bad about us?" While I'd be willing to help people find on a macro level if their employees are satisfied, I try to discourage anyone from using that information to go after individuals, from piercing the veil of Internet pseudo-anonymity, and would actually refuse to do so. It's bad PR for them, bad PR for us, and all-around bad practice. That said, with tens of thousands of firms scanning people's e-mails and listening to their phone calls, I know not everyone shares my beliefs, or at least, my morality. With information becoming more pervasive, and access to that information democratizing, there's an almost inevitable march towards the ability to find out most anything about most anyone. Anonymity, and in particular anonymity through obscurity, will all but disappear. The only way to stop this would be very strict laws, with accompanying strict penalties, for data leaks and information sharing, but unintended consequences aside, that's the opposite direction of the one in which we're headed.

I suppose we might as well get used to it.