I came across this interesting news item today, that made me sit up and take notice. A 22 year old Orkut user was arrested in Pune, here in India for posting “derogatory” messages against Sonia Gandhi in an Orkut forum. You can also read the IBN news article here. It seems that people from the Congress party lodged a police complaint against this guy, and the police contacted Google, which in turn was only happy to give out personal details of its offending subscriber “in compliance with valid Indian legal process”.

This is an excellent example of what I was talking about in one of my articles about online privacy. I haven’t read what the accused had posted on Orkut, so I can’t really talk about that. But one thing is for certain. If you write something which can be deemed offensive to someone, all it takes is a simple police complaint to land you in prison – don’t expect Google or any service provider to protect you. Because they won’t.

I repeat, constant vigilance!

The Internet is well known for the anonymity it provides. All of us have enjoyed this anonymity at some point of time, haven’t we? There’s this feeling of privacy, of being secure as long as we are not foolish enough to divulge our personal details. Everything, from searching for illegal stuff to finding maps of frowned-upon places in your town – it’s all okay as long as it’s done on the Internet, right? Or are we falling prey to our own complacency as we spend those long hours on the Internet? How many of us end up leaving a trail of all our online adventures?

I usually wonder about this when I see companies like Google and Yahoo providing a host of services all under the umbrella of a single account. Let’s take Google for example. Let’s say you have signed in to your GMail account in your Firefox browser (as we all are, at some point during the day). And you want to do a web search, so you open a new tab by clicking on the web link at the top. The funny thing is, your Google session is still active (you can see your GMail ID at the top) and all your web searches are being recorded. In fact, you can see your past searches and trends at the web history page. That includes all kinds of searches – web, image, blogs, books, products – you name it. You frequently chat with your friends and family on GTalk. You open Google maps to find the route from your home/office to different places. You have all your photos tucked away in your Picasa account. Your Google Reader feeds give you your daily reading material. Your credit card info is in your Google Checkout account. Your orkut account lists hundreds of your friends. Your plans this week are in your Google calendar and your documents on Google docs, some potentially confidential and possibly incriminating, I might add. And have you ever wondered how the “relevant” text ads in GMail get their “relevance” from? Isn’t it a script that scans your personal mails looking for keywords for their text ads? So what’s wrong with all that, you ask me. But there is. All your personally identifiable information is on Google’s servers and all your search escapades can be mapped to a single account – yours. Anonymity on the Internet, anyone?

Don’t get me wrong – I am not saying that Google is out to cash in on your personal information. Not at all. I am one of the many people who remain grateful to Google for all these wonderful products. Heck, I use Google services as much as anyone else does and I can’t imagine my day without it. All I am saying is, a truck-load of your personal data is there on someone else’s machine, whether or not someone takes advantage of it. And that data is only as secure as the company wants it to be. I am sure we all agree that there will always be people in any company who will have the clearance to look at all the data residing in their company’s servers (those are the people with keys to the fabled executive washroom). Is it so darn difficult to imagine someone (the government, the terrorist who has kidnapped the CEO’s niece, the dictator who has nursed hatred towards you ever since you beat him in ping-pong back in high school) who arm-twists that company to trace and divulge details about you? I am not saying switch off that modem and cut yourself off from the world. All I am saying is you need to be careful, and see where you are putting all your data. Just do a bit of a background check on the company before you trust it. And decide what data that company can be trusted with. Never give away your passwords to any of your existing accounts (for those of you who just said “duh!”, here’s an example : a particular social networking site asks for your GMail password when you sign up, presumably to invite people on your contact list. And you can’t skip the step. I get invites from my friends every other day!). And of course, when in doubt, just say no thanks, or log off.

Constant vigilance!