[SGVLUG] Fw: FYI: Meetup.com & PRIVACY isn't what you might think...

[John E. Kreznar]

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Tom Emerson <osnut at pacbell.net> writes:

> The moderator of a "meetup" group that I've joined recently posted a
> warning message about the meetup site and how your "privacy" might
> not be as protected as you might think. ...

> ----- Forwarded Message ----
> From: [group moderator] <info at meetup.com>
> To: [the_group]-announce at meetup.com
> Subject: FYI / Meetups / PRIVACY notice / Please Read!

> Greetings, all -- 

> It recently came to my attention that it's possible to locate Meetup
> profiles with a Google search. ...

> There is an option to hide the list, for privacy.  However, even
> that might not be sufficient to totally protect your privacy, since
> there are various other ways that members interact with the group,
> leaving comments and messages, etc....

> The other option would be to change your user name.  If you're
> currently using your legal name, then that might be a good idea.

> [...] [TE: the next section dealt with ways to remove your name from
> the meetup "profile" page, but if you've been a member longer than a
> few months, it is likely to have been "cached" by the search engines
> -- suffice it to say, it's a difficult genie to get back into the
> bottle...]

a.k.a. "The Internet never forgets".

> [TE: Ultimately, the "final solution" is to leave and re-join
> meetup.com as a new member, taking care to not spill the beans that
> you are the same person that just left...]

...even to the point of using a different writing style, if you can.

> There is no other way that I'm aware of to be safely 
> disentangled from the Google cache of your Meetup profile, 
> since it goes by your membership number. 

> Anyway: it's up to each individual how much privacy 
> you wish to maintain online.  For some people just 
> hiding the list of their meetup groups will be enough, 
> while others will probably want to change their user 
> name; and a few people might even want to go through 
> the process of leaving meetup.com, and re-joining.

It's naive of the author to suppose that any of these would erase all
record of who's who.  An individual wanting privacy has to assume that
every Internet packet leaving her site, and every Internet packet
entering, is archived -- in case someone, sometime, wants to assemble
a dossier.

What some folks do to counter this is to maintain encrypted cover
traffic out- and in-bound at all times, substituting live traffic when
available, in such a way that it is technically infeasible for the
other party to trace the originator.

- -- 
 John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com 9F1148454619A5F08550 705961A47CC541AFEF13

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