amy polumbo

Kevin Bankston was a closet smoker who hid his habit by sneaking cigarettes outside his San Francisco office. He expected anonymity on a big city street. But in 2005, an online mapping service that provided ground-level photographs captured him smoking―and made the image available to anyone on the Internet. This year, Google's Street View project caught him again.

Coincidence? Absolutely. Yet Bankston's twice-documented smoking highlights a wider phenomenon: Privacy is a withering commodity for all of us.

What you buy, where you go, whom you call, the Web sites you visit, the e-mails you send―all of that information can be monitored and logged. "When you're out in public, it's becoming a near certainty that your image will be captured," says (the newly nonsmoking) Bankston.

Should you care? I've interviewed numerous people on all sides of the privacy debate to find out just how wary we should be.

One thing is clear: In today's world, maintaining a cocoon of privacy simply isn't practical. Need a mortgage or a car loan? A legitimate lender is going to verify a wealth of private information, including your name and address, date of birth, Social Security number and credit history. We all make daily trade-offs for convenience and thrift: Electronic tollbooths mean you don't have to wait in the cash-only lane, but your travel habits will be tracked. The Piggly Wiggly discount card saves you $206 on your annual grocery bill, but it counts how many doughnuts and six-packs you buy. MySpace posts make it easy to keep in touch with friends, but your comments live on.

So how do you live in a digital world and still maintain a semblAnce of privacy? Experts say it's crucial to recognize that those bits of data are permanent―a trail of electronic crumbs that is never swept away, available to anyone with the skills and inclination to sniff it out.

Privacy may not feel like much of an issue for those in their teens and 20s. They've grown up chronicling their lives on popular social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook for easy retrieval by friends and strangers alike. But some young people don't realize that what was funny to college buddies might not amuse a law-firm recruiter. Employers regularly research job applicants on the Internet. Some colleges are helping students prepare: Duke University hosts seminars on how to clean up a Facebook account. "You learn why posting pictures of you riding the mechanical bull at Shooters is a bad idea," says Sarah Ball, a senior whose own page is secure and clean.

Amy Polumbo, 22, restricted her page on Facebook to 100 or so people who knew her password. "It was a way for me to keep in touch with friends all over the country," she says. But after she was crowned Miss New Jersey in June, someone downloaded pictures of her and threatened blackmail. She thwarted the attempt by releasing the photos herself (they're quite innocent) but suffered weeks of embarrassment.

"I know how easy it is for someone to take advantage of you on the Internet," says Polumbo. "The Web is a place where people can destroy your reputation if you're not careful."

In fact, all kinds of transgressions now are easily retrievable. An employee at a New York City bank watched his reputation shrink when his colleagues pulled up an article from a small-town newspaper about his drunk-driving arrest two years earlier. Divorce lawyers have been issuing subpoenas for electronic tollbooth records to use in custody cases. (You say you're home at 6 p.m. to have dinner with the kids, but Fast Lane says you're getting off the Massachusetts Turnpike at 7 p.m.) Abbe L. Ross, a divorce lawyer in Boston, finds a gold mine in computers: financial data, e-mails, what Web sites a soon-to-be-ex spouse looks at and for how long. "I love to look through hard drives," she says.

Details about you already are stashed in enormous databases. Unless you pay cash for everything, data brokers almost certainly have compiled a profile of you that will be bought and sold dozens of times to marketers and direct-mail firms. "There's almost nothing they can't find out about you," says Jack Dunning, who worked in the junk-mail business for 35 years. Right now, there are roughly 50,000 such lists for sale in a $4 billion a year industry. Now junk mail is going digital: Companies can use personal profiles and records from Internet search engines to tailor advertising―both what you see and precisely when you see it―to individual consumers.

And new databases are being created all the time. Most of the major proposals for health-care reform, for example, include compiling medical records into easily and widely accessible digital files. In July, the FBI requested $5 million to pay the major phone companies to maintain logs of your calls―information the Feds can't legally stockpile themselves but might find useful later.

Surveillance cameras are increasingly ubiquitous in our post-9/11 world. Indeed, New York City plans to ring the financial district with them, as central London did several years ago.
Of course, there are upsides. London's network of cameras helped capture failed car bombers in June. And streamlined electronic medical records would make health care safer and more efficient.
Anthony Campbell ought to feel relieved. The Rider University dean of students was cleared last week of criminal charges in the drinking death of a freshman, and Campbell's lawyer expects to get all traces of the baseless indictment wiped from his record.

But the Internet has a longer memory ― one that's virtually impossible to erase.

"Now, people start with a Google search, then do a formal criminal background search. The former will produce results that the latter won't. And I don't see any way to prevent that," laments Rocco Cipparone Jr., Campbell's attorney.

The Net has enhanced free speech and self-expression for millions. But it's proving a curse for others whose reputations become snarled in a Web of old news stories, nasty blog posts and indiscreet Facebook profiles that never fade away.

For fees ranging from $30 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, services such as ReputationDefender, DefendMyName, Naymz and International Reputation Management attempt damage control. They coax Web sites to yank contentious postings, or try to rig search results on Google and Yahoo so disputed links appear less prominently.

Even so, news stories and government records are practically etched in cyberstone. There is no magic digital eraser, experts say.

"Nothing you put on the Web is ever definitely gone," says Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of MySpace. Everything "is indexed by someone, somewhere."

A CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,150 hiring managers last year found that one in four uses Internet search engines to vet job candidates, and one in 10 uses social networking sites. More than half of those managers said they reject applicants as a result.

Yet many victims are oblivious. Two-thirds of respondents from "Generation Y" (those under age 30) are unaware that potential employers are scoping them out online, according to a survey by Adecco, a consulting firm.

"If this keeps up, there will be no one to hire, no one to marry. Everyone has a past; no one is perfect," says Amy Polumbo. Her crown as Miss New Jersey was jeopardized earlier this year by blackmail threats involving her own Facebook photos ― suggestive pictures she intended to share only with friends.

Polumbo went public with her pictures. Now she crusades for prudence in posting, especially when using seemingly "private" sites.

Still, she says, "It's really scary to think I don't have privacy anymore. I feel like I can't go out for my friends' birthdays anymore or hang out and goof around, because someone might take a picture of me."

Such concerns may be moot for future generations, when everyone's life is an open book.

"If you don't care, live like you don't care," suggests Bruce Schneier, author of "Beyond Fear" and a computer security expert. "If someone wants to deny you a job because of drunken pictures you posted five years ago, you don't want to work there."

Web users can try to cover their tracks. Hushmail and PGP promise secure e-mail. Bugmenot.com provides bogus e-mail addresses for logging on to Web sites. Anonymizer.com can route traffic through the Internet equivalent of a hall of mirrors.

But once names, photos and videos hit the Net, good luck reeling them in.

Google, the No. 1 search engine, offers steps for making Web sites invisible to its searches, and for removing indexed items on request. But requests usually are honored only if you operate the site in question. If your beef is with someone else's site, Google says you should approach that site.

"Google is not capable of being the arbiter of what does and does not appear on the Web," says a spokesperson, adding that Google generally frowns on efforts to rig search results.

Robert Russo charges corporations upward of $1,000 a month to do just that.

"All it takes is one negative link to destroy a company's reputation," says Russo, whose DefendMyName service tries to bump unflattering links off the first page of search results.

MySpace and Facebook say they handle complaints about derogatory postings on a case-by-case basis. The same goes for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a federally backed project that has preserved billions of Web pages since 1996.

"A lot of things were not meant for posterity," the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle told The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., last year.

ReputationDefender charges clients $30 to "destroy" an item posted online. Mostly, that involves sweet-talking webmasters.

Lawyers are a last resort. To alter search results, flattering Web sites sometimes must be created from scratch. Fees start at $10,000 and can climb into the hundreds of thousands.

"There's nothing we do that you can't do yourself," says Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who started ReputationDefender last year. "It's just a matter of convenience, time and efficiency."

Some clients just want Web searches to display their top achievements before "the lame stuff," Fertik says.

Others aim to undo real or perceived damage. He cites a student finishing a psychiatric residency who worries that people will Google a paper he wrote about his own clinical depression. Another battle pits Fertik's 30-person team in Silicon Valley against a forum that has posted lewd remarks about female law students.

Fertik insists he won't lie for clients, or help crooks or cheats. He tries not to stir false hopes.

"Sometimes you're out of luck; you're going to have to live with it," he says of Internet nastiness. "There is no silver bullet, no button you can push."

Still, most experts say we need to be vigilant about the increasing encroachments on our privacy.

The ability to collect information and images has outpaced the security available to protect them. Since January 2005, nearly 160 million personal records have been stolen or inadvertently posted online.

And even if information stays secure, the big question remains: Who should be allowed to access these databases? The FBI might find evidence against a few bad guys in millions of phone records, but the government could track all of your calls too. (President Bush has acknowledged that the National Security Agency tapped phone calls, though whose and how many is unknown.)

Even more disturbing: All of those data files can be linked and cross-referenced. At the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, fans were scanned with cameras linked to facial-recognition software in a hunt for suspected terrorists. Some privacy advocates worry that police could videotape anti-war marches and create a library of digital faces or start mining Web pages for personal information.

Kevin Bankston was only caught smoking, but he's worried about larger implications: "The issue isn't whether you have anything to hide," he says. "The issue is whether the lack of privacy would give the government an inordinate amount of power over the populace. This is about maintaining the privacy necessary for us to flourish as a free society."ONLINE
Celebrity Teaches Students About Internet Privacy
By DAN CARNEVALE

What's better than talking to new freshmen about the importance of Internet safety and privacy? Bringing in a celebrity who has been burned by online photos.

The Wagner College student Amy Polumbo, who is Miss New Jersey, spoke to freshmen at the school about the dangers of putting too much personal information on the Internet. Many students post private information and pictures on their Facebook or MySpace pages, and then are shocked when strangers see them.

Ms. Polumbo shared her own life lesson. Pictures of her partying and striking odd poses went from her Facebook page to the front page, and they almost cost her her crown.