Your Address Is on the Internet

By Bill Fick

If noisy debates about the privacy of personal information on the Internet seem remote to your life here in Russia, think again. The entire Moscow City Telephone Company (MGTS) residential subscriber database, with more than 2.8 million records, is now available online at http://www.xland.ru.

Moscow has long suffered from the lack of anything resembling a "White Pages" directory, and ordinary alphabetized electronic phone listings would warrant only praise. However, this database is searchable by any parameter, which means that if somebody knows your phone number, he or she can find out your address instantly, right down to your korpus, podezd, and apartment number. It is a stalker’s dream, particularly in a country where anybody can buy a telephone with caller-ID at the market.

The other troubling factor is that this is not an official MGTS service and you (or the owner of your apartment) cannot simply request an "unlisted" number. The on-line database evolved from an underground CD-ROM called "Moscow and Muscovites" that has been circulating for some time, and is described by the site administrator as nothing more than an experimental project to test technical means (hardware and software) to provide a massive information resource through the Web.

While the data is 1993 vintage, the correlation between addresses and phone numbers rarely changes, and now Ivan Ivanovich doesn’t live in his apartment — you do. The site has served more than 1500 queries since January 27.

We should all realize that as new media leverage public domain information, we leave electronic footprints in our wake, and the fuzzy halo of privacy and obscurity around each of us grows smaller and smaller. I recently did a search of my name in the Nexis periodical database and was shocked at the number of references, including the full text of letters to the editor of The Chicago Tribune that I wrote in 1985. My credit history and more recent postings to Internet newsgroups and conferences provide ample material for any market researcher seeking to profile my interests and tastes.

The issue, of course, is where to draw the line between "public" and "private" information. Under pressure last June, Lexis-Nexis discontinued a function in its "P-TRAK" service where subscribers could, for a fee, obtain an individual’s social security number based on his or her name and last known address. P-TRAK still provides name and address information for a given social security number, and as a result of public outcry in October the company posted a special page on its website (http://www.lexis-nexis.com/Incc/p-trak/p-trak.html) explaining its point of view on the controversy and offering people a chance to request that their names be removed from the database.

In general, I don’t deny that responsible directory services are very useful, especially as people become more mobile and acquire an ever increasing array of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. One of the best Internet "people finders" if you are seeking ordinary address and telephone information, is http://www.switchboard.com. Switchboard explains its privacy policies up-font, professes to compile information only from phone books and other published sources, and allows you to correct information or remove your own listing.

Sites which specialize in directories of e-mail addresses include http://www.four11.com, which offers a celebrity listing and other unusual features, http://www.whowhere.com, and http://www.infospaceinc.com. Other useful directories include a listing of toll free numbers at http://www.att.net/dir800 and a zip code finder at http://www.semaphorecorp.com/cgi/form.html.

Good business listings include http://www.bigyellow.com, which features international references, http://www.555-1212.com, and http://www.bigbook.com.

Closer to home, the Moscow Business Telephone Guide, that gem available free in hotels around town, has produced a searchable Web version at http://www.moscow.net. In practice, however, this resource can be difficult to use on-line from Moscow because it is located on an Internet host in the United States and the pages are poorly designed with large graphic files which can seem to take years to load. The database query form is also somewhat finicky, but in a pinch it can still be a lifesaver.

If you haven’t been able to find yourself in any of these databases and are feeling smugly anonymous, you should make a last stop at http://www.13x.com/cgi-bin/cdt/snoop.pl, which may shock you with the amount of personal information that it scans instantly from your Web browser configuration, including your name, e-mail address, location, and list of other Web sites you have visited recently.

Now that you feel violated, exposed and at risk of drowning in a sea of personal revelation, you can seek refuge among the strident privacy advocates who also populate the Web. The most prominent organizations with extensive information on the Net include the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (http://www.epic.org), and the Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org). The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (http://www.privacyrights.org) merits special notice for its extensive practical guides to guard your privacy – from eliminating junk mail to protecting your credit history.

The "Anonymizer" web proxy service at http://www.anonymizer.com will help you to browse the web anonymously. By starting your Web foray at Anonymizer, sites which you visit subsequently will be blocked from receiving any data from your browser.

A multitude of technical solutions with various levels of complexity and security to ensure anonymous e-mail transmission have also been developed. An excellent introduction to the topic is available at http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/remailers/index.html, with a list of global remailers and extensive performance data about each at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/remailer-list.html.

For better or worse, however, the tides seem to be running against remailers, and you can never be completely certain of anonymity. One of the most popular remailer services, Finland’s Penet, recently shut down in the face of a Finish court decision that it should reveal the name of user in a civil action brought by the Church of Scientology and after press allegations that its primary clientele consists of child pornographers.

Legislators in both Russia and the U.S. have started to make noises about new legislation to protect on-line privacy rights, but this will take some time and meanwhile I can recommend only caution and awareness.