I just yesterday stumbled across an interview with Symantecs CEO John W. Thompson in German engineers magazin VDI-Nachrichten.
On the topic of a fake passport for "Elvis Presley" passing controls at an airport in the Netherlands, he suggested:
So, to get this straight, this man believes in monitoring Internet users to find out how dangerous they are, and give that information to companies.
Asked about the privacy issues there, he did not see any concerns there, and further critized European privacy dealings as going too far:
Anyway... creating profiles on all visited websites and sharing them with companies as a way to make the web safer? Seems like someone didn't read George Orwells 1984 (or took his inspirations from that). All else I can say is that I would not trust the anti-spyware software from a company whose CEO believes in total monitoring of users (or just call it spyware) itself!
On the topic of a fake passport for "Elvis Presley" passing controls at an airport in the Netherlands, he suggested:
"Vorstellen kann ich mir da bereits eher - jetzt in Bezug auf das Internet -, dass man auf Basis des Leumundes eines Anwenders vorgeht. Man schaut, was ist das für ein Anwender, welche Seiten hat er besucht, welche Gefahr geht von ihm aus? Auf Basis dieser Infos lässt sich dann ein Profil erstellen und Unternehmen können darauf entsprechend reagieren."
Translated into English, he said he could imagine, in regards to the Internet, that decision could be made based on the reputation of users. One could watch which websites he visits [and?] which dangers are resulting from that. Based on this information a profile could be created that would allow corporations [!] to react to that.
So, to get this straight, this man believes in monitoring Internet users to find out how dangerous they are, and give that information to companies.
Asked about the privacy issues there, he did not see any concerns there, and further critized European privacy dealings as going too far:
In Europa ist immer alles eine Frage des Datenschutzes. Die EU sagt: Eine IP-Adresse ist privat, das ist übertrieben. Datenschutz wird über alles gestülpt, dient oft nur als Vorwand. Ich frage Sie: Was ist schützenswert an einer IP-Adresse?
Next to the issue that monitoring visited websites goes a bit beyond simply IP addresses, static IP addresses are not that different from a phone number or postal address. I remember very well from university times that a dorm IP could easily be tracked to the name of a person in minutes. Static IPs can be attacked to get more information about the owner - and Symantec very well knows how that many computers are not safe enough to withstand that. IP addresses might thus easily and without official requests involved uncover the personal identity of a websurfer.
Anyway... creating profiles on all visited websites and sharing them with companies as a way to make the web safer? Seems like someone didn't read George Orwells 1984 (or took his inspirations from that). All else I can say is that I would not trust the anti-spyware software from a company whose CEO believes in total monitoring of users (or just call it spyware) itself!
