Two recent stories exquisitely highlight problems in electronic communications. First, from the Boston Globe, October 19, 1995, as quoted by Espen Anderson on Risks-Forum Digest (comp.risks):
...A high-level executive with a Manhattan health company had a new technology that allows users to tape themselves with a tiny camera built into their monitor, send it through the system, and have it appear on the recipient's screen as a talking, moving image.
One night, arriving at her hotel, she flipped open her portable computer and began recording such a message. Sitting before her laptop in the privacy of her room, she teasingly disrobed, performed what a corporate lawyer later would describe as a "shimmy," and purred to the intended recipient, a fellow married colleague, "Hurry to the hotel and here's what you get tonight."
Problem is, she struck the wrong button on her computer, and the video flashed on the screens of more than 400 employees throughout her health company ‹ subordinates, bosses and people who had never met her before.
This story points out how insecure electronic mail can be. Even if your computer and its communications lines are working well, "operator error" can easily send mail to the wrong party. Misdirected mail is surprisingly common. Use caution when sending your home videos.
You can encrypt your mail so that no one but the intended recipient can view a message. (Would that our health-care executive knew this.) The most common "freeware" system is called "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP). Developed by Phil Zimmermann, it is distributed on the World Wide Web at
<http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html>
;I have lately been evaluating MacPGP, the Macintosh form. While the system works and offers quite a high level of security, it is cumbersome to use. The mechanics of encrypting and decrypting are simple enough, but generating and exchanging the required keys are arcane procedures. In its present form, it will appeal mainly to "power users." If you want my public key, with which you can generate messages that only I can read, use the Internet "finger" command on ewing@pantheon.cis.yale.edu.
Today's second example also comes from the Boston Globe via "Edupage,"
October 26, 1995:
DEJANEWS SPARKS PRIVACY CONCERNS
DejaNews Partners, an Internet service that catalogues and indexes Usenet messages, is under attack for the service's potential to violate Internet users' privacy. The service makes copies of every Usenet message and indexes them for easy retrieval. For instance, by typing in someone's name, you can track the messages they posted to various newsgroups over a given period of time. Some Internet users resent the "Big Brother" aspects of the service: "No one ever mentioned to me that it was possible to take a different program and run a search on what you've written," says one. "When you post to Usenet, it automatically gets propagated to tens of thousands of computers," replies DejaNews's president. "So anybody who posted something to Usenet and then later on has any kind of privacy concerns about it must have seriously misunderstood what they were doing." DejaNews can be reached at
http://dejanews.com/"><http://dejanews.com/">http://dejanews.com/>
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(Boston Globe 23 Oct 95)
What is the etiquette of disclosing an electronic communication that you have properly received? It is very easy to click "forward" and re-send a message to any number of people. Generally that is bad form without permission from the author. It happens to me sometimes, and it is annoying and even embarrassing. I have learned to add "please do not forward this message" to some kinds of mail. Even though etiquette is on the author's side, we need to practice "defensive" e-mail.
DejaNews goes a step further. This firm is proposing to "harvest" the publicly posted news messages on the Usenet section of the Internet for uses not intended by the authors. We may say that this is rude and impolite, but is it worse than compiling lists of those who write newspaper letters to the editor? As with many computer ethics issues, what may be tolerable with traditional media becomes unacceptable when done on a mass basis with computers.
To a conservatively minded person, it is never appropriate to disclose a private message without permission, even if it has reached you by accident. C&IS;has strong rules about how staff must treat e-mail in the course of their duties, for example. Regrettably, our emerging electronic society is not yet so civilized. We may not enjoy it, but it is only prudent to assume that "Big Brother" could be watching and recording whatever we send out on the network.
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