Privacy, The Internet and Me

I have a box that I keep underneath my desk of all the letters I've received since I was two years old. I've had the same box since I was 10; it's overflowing now, the sides are coming apart, and the red piece of yarn that holds it together is badly frayed.

After some active use a couple of years ago, I rarely need to add anything to my box anymore. The things I get in the mail today (parking tickets, election notices, an occasional package) are not the sort of things that warrant careful cataloging in an old cardboard box tied tight with a red piece of yarn.

This is not because I have ceased to have meaningful personal correspondences; indeed, I am in touch with more people, more regularly, than I have been at any other point in my life. But these people, like myself, all have e-mail. And so today I trade jokes with a doctor at Mass General over e-mail, I discuss bluegrass with an 80-year-old deejay in Georgia over e-mail and I continue many meaningful, personal, intense correspondences over e-mail.

Admittedly, there is something lost when I sign onto to one of my several accounts and scroll down my messages and look at their authors: "theinsider," "thug1," "fleagirl," "tubesox." At their most personal, these messages are from people like "MSonnensch," and they receive replies from "Smnookin."

Reading identically fonted messages on a computer screen does not compare to receiving individual letters, on individual stationary, with individual handwriting and doodles and cross-outs. Despite these trade-offs, and despite the recent popular trend in Ludditism, I am not knocking e-mail. As a freelance writer, I conduct most of my business via e-mail. As an information junkie, I receive news about comic book, new records, serial killers, occult religions and popular culture daily from literally hundreds of people via e-mail. And, as a letter writer, I've learned to transcribe many of most intimate thoughts to my closest friends through e-mail.

I hold out on some aspects of electronic communication. I don't buy things over the Internet, so I never need to worry about having my credit-card number swiped. But that's probably because I don't have a credit card.

"Dan, what to say.... I am gripped with a depression that seems to know no bounds, it sucks me into myself, takes away my desire to read, to work, to talk, to fuck, to traffic with the world in any way."

So began a recent e-letter to one of my best friends, a photography student at Yale. As one might suspect, various missives on both of our parts are considerably more personal than this--after an article I wrote last fall on the workings of the unconscious, Dan and I tried to transcribe every thought, no matter how mundane or ridiculous, to each other. Not the type of information I'd like to be made available to the general public. If this had been written in a letter, this fear would be the stuff of paranoid fantasies.

As it is, my Harvard account (which I have because of my work with the Council for Responsible Genetics) was broken into by someone who had seen me type in my password, and although my Harvard account is rarely used for personal communication, such is the nature of Dan's and my correspondence that whenever one of us are faced with a means of communication, we seize upon it.

The person who broke into my account did so because of a misguided perception that there might be information regarding her, and if there was, she had a right to know about it. Despite the fact that breaking into a person's e-mail account, like stealing someone's mail, is a federal offense, I truly believe that this person felt she wasn't doing anything wrong, wasn't broaching any personal boundaries, never mind breaking any federal laws.

It occurred to me when I discovered that my account had been violated that my thoughts could be forwarded to a enormous community of computer users (still mainly academics, professionals and government workers) with no more than a click at the "Forward" icon. A fairly obvious realization. But, in fact, even private communications are often shared by the sender and/or the receiver (ever so tempting if one says something stupid, or funny, or shares some gossip or tales of a recent tryst).

And why should anyone balk at this? Personal web pages abound as a seeming antidote for those who can't get onto talk shows. "I masturbated three times today while checking out Hustler On-Line," read one home-page I saw today. Another went on to describe the "psychotic disfunctionality" of his family life. (I'll spare you the temptation by not printing the URLs.) People's thoughts, their actions, their lives, are increasingly seen as traffic in an ever-expanding public discourse.

So, what to do? I don't profess to know an answer. I'm half-heartedly tempted to say something ridiculous along the lines of we need to learn how to respect ourselves, to have integrity, and to respect other people, but I know that's a crock of shit. The Information Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, can't be stopped; romantics wishing for a time of ribbon-tied letter-boxes are as stupid, and as besides the point, as those wishing for an era before factories.

But I can't help thinking that there's something perversely sick about a person who feels he or she has the right to break into someone else's account, and that perversity is spreading. The notion of privacy of any sort is rapidly diminishing. There are already those in the electronic community working against this rising tide--individuals who write anonymous re-mailer programs, who disseminate easy-to-use cryptography programs. But all this seems equally perverse, the product of some semi-fictional Pynchonian conspiracy theory.

So I guess I don't have an answer to the questions, and problems, that the easy-access into other people's thoughts provide. If I figure one out, you'll be sure to hear about it--just find some way to log onto my account.

Seth Mnookin '94 (smnookin@aol.com) is a freelance writer and the director of education at the Council for Responsible Genetics.