Privacy Hypotheticals

Privacy today is not what it was a decade ago. We have created a set of new privacy hypotheticals to provide examples of ways by which an individual can lose his or her privacy in today's digital world.

  • Dustin Touglas is a film producer who understands that his reputation in the film 
industry is essential and that BooTube views are now a measure of your appeal. Because 
of this, he is careful to keep questionable and/or poorly shot material on private settings, 
where people need a password to view it. He posted a video of himself complaining 
about the band for which he was filming a music video.  He complained about how their 
music sucked, how they were only able to make this video because of the band 
members’ wealthy parents, and how the girl in the band is a slut. Dustin’s a humorous 
guy, especially when he’s drunk and pissed off. Tory, Dustin’s friend, used the password 
to access the video and decided to repost it without a password. The video quickly shot 
to the top of BooTube’s most viewed list. Dustin quickly contacts BooTube’s owner 
company, Goggle. It takes Goggle four days to remove the video – enough time for 
Dustin to lose his next contract with the band.


  • For the last couple of weeks, Sam Brelinsky has been hooking up with Andrew, 
the ex-boyfriend of Sam’s roommate and best friend, Ryan. Sam and Andrew decided it 
was easiest to just keep it a secret, so they exclusively hook up at Andrew’s place. Last 
night, Sam drank too much, blacked out, and lost his wallet. While Sam was in the 
shower, Ryan realized he could digitally retrace Sam’s steps using the recorded GPS 
information on Sam’s oPhone. Ryan picked up Sam’s phone and began going through 
the information. Ryan was confused when he saw Sam was at Andrew’s house the night 
before. Curious, Ryan looked further and realized that Sam has been at Andrew’s house 
most nights of the week, often until the next morning. 


 • ThreeTriangle is a new social networking tool that lets you see friends and 
friends-of-friends who are physically close to you at present. ThreeTriangle is meant to 
serve as the link between people who may or may not have met before. When Katie 
checks into a location, an announcement is sent to all of Katie’s friends and friends-of- 
friends within a half-mile radius. ThreeTriangle designers want to maximize the 
usefulness of the social network, so they set the default privacy settings as least secure 
as possible. To ease security concerns, ThreeTriangle allows Katie to block certain users 
from receiving any updates from her. This blacklist mechanism requires Katie to list the 
ThreeTriangle user names of any people she wants not to receive updates. A blacklist is 
in opposition of a whitelist, where Katie would have to approve a member before a 
message is sent to that user.  
 Katie had blocked her ex-boyfriend from receiving her updates because he had a 
bad habit of showing up wherever she checked in. Once he realized he hadn’t received 
any updates from Katie, an avid ThreeTriangle user, he decided to make second 
ThreeTriangle account, friend one of their mutual friends from that account, and head 
down to her favorite row of bars and wait for her to check in at one of them. He 
promptly heads to the next place she checks in and continues to “accidently” run into her 
most weekend nights, without ever letting on that he is doing so through ThreeTriangle. 


  • Alexis Sillon lived an extravagant life for a while – partying internationally at 
the hottest clubs. Carrying around her credit card was a drag, so she had an RFID chip 
implanted into her hand with her name, birthdate (for age verification), and credit card 
information on it. To close out her tab, all she had to do was wave her hand within five 
feet of the club’s RFID reader.  
 Jon, a regional stock manager of the large chain Walshop, drove by the church 
where Alexis was attending an AA/NA meeting. Jon used RFIDs to maintain stock 
levels in the various Walshop. Because of the size of warehouses, Walshop bought the 
most recent RFID readers, which had a range of 60 feet. As Jon was driving from one 
store to another his RFID reader beeped. Looking over at the reader, he saw Alexis’s 
name and information pop up on the reader. Thinking on his feet, he quickly wrote down 
the information and began making subtle charges on her credit cards, which went 
unnoticed for months.  


  • Marack Olama is the only Muslim male in a predominately white neighborhood. 
He has a day job at a bank, but his real passion is to become a writer. He’s been working 
on his first suspense novel at night for the past year. The search engine he uses, 
Aluminum, gains extra money by selling sets of web searches that have been 
“declassified.” One company looking to optimize advertising bought many of these data 
sets for their analyses. Chris Green is in charge of this project and he notices something 
suspicious when looking through the data sets. One user has an inordinate number of 
searches of terms like “jihad” “train bombing” “dirty bombs” and “explosion impact 
patterns.” More alarmingly, these searches are mixed in with searches related to his 
neighborhood – in particular, directions to and from Marack’s house. Chris alerts the 
police but as far as he can tell, the police do nothing.  
Chris decides to take matters into his own hands and warn his neighbors. He 
creates a website that identifies Marack as a homegrown terrorist and cites his searches 
as proof. The website quickly picks up steam throughout the neighborhood and in the 
general Internet community. The 6chan /d/ community catches wind of this website and 
decides to launch a Goggle bomb. For the next two months, when someone began typing 
“Marack” into the search bar, Aluminum suggested the autocomplete statement “Marack 
is a homegrown terrorist.” When his first book hit the stands, many readers refused to 
purchase or read it because Marack was “linked” to terrorist organizations.  

  
  • Stop and Buy is a grocery store that offers customers with Stop and Buy cards 
customized coupons based on the customer’s previous purchases. These coupons are 
profitable because Stop and Buy sells the information collected from the cards to 
consumer analysts. A fertility clinic employs consumer analysts to determine which 
neighborhoods purchase higher than average amounts of pregnancy tests. The fertility 
clinic moves in and begins advertising with signs reading, “You’re not alone: 30% of 
women in this neighborhood struggle with becoming pregnant!” accompanied by 
pictures in which actual receipts were reconstructed (meaning, all the items on the 
receipt were put photographed in a shopping cart) with the pregnancy test right on top. 
Catherine Cavalier, a neighborhood woman who has been trying to get pregnant for two 
years, recognizes her weekly shopping list in the cart – down to the same brands and less 
common items. 


  • VictoriasSshhh.com uses cookies to make returning visitors’ shopping 
experiences more pleasant. When someone visits the website, VictoriaSshh.com cookies 
let the website suggest items similar to the user’s previous purchases and automatically 
look for items in the user’s size. Her own laptop broken, Rachel Lee used her husband’s 
laptop to purchase new bras and underwear on VictoriasSshhh.com. Rachel quickly 
realized that the suggested sizes were not her size and the similar items were unlike 
anything her husband had given her.  
Rachel is able to log onto her husband’s Bookface account, since the default 
setting is to remain logged in after closing the window. She looks through his messages 
and discovers he is having an affair with a woman named Liz Narner. Rachel uses online 
search service to look up Liz and finds her phone number. Only after leaving many, 
increasingly aggressive voicemails does Rachel learn that the online search service 
incorrectly listed a Liz Parner’s phone number as Liz Narner’s. 


  • Chelsea Tillet is the head of social networking for Parah Salin’s presidential 
campaign. The heads of the campaign love what Chelsea is doing with social networking 
but don’t know about her Furry fetish. Chelsea is a member of several private Furry 
groups on Bookface, but is very careful to keep her membership private from her 
colleagues. Dristol Salin, Parah’s daughter, is also working on the campaign in between 
shooting episodes of Twirling With The Supernovas, a popular dance competition reality 
show. Bored on Bookface one day, Dristol sees that she has many friends in common 
with Chelsea and looks through them. Beyond fellow campaign workers, Dristol notices 
that many of the friends in common are friends she met while at Furry conventions, 
since she too has a secret Furry fetish.  
 Over the next few days, Dristol goes out of her way to walk by Chelsea, who is 
always on Bookface, so that she can see Chelsea’s Bookface ads. In a surprising stroke 
of intelligence, Dristol knows that Bookface’s ad formula fails to take into account 
whether a user’s membership to a group is private or not. So the appearance of the same 
ads that Dristol gets on Bookface confirm Dristol’s suspicion that Chelsea also has a 
Furry fetish. Not willing to risk being exposed by Chelsea, Dristol begins to monitor 
Chelsea’s email, as allowed by Chelsea’s contract, looking for anything upon which to 
fire her. Dristol fires Chelsea for lack of support the minute Chelsea sends an email 
questioning any of the campaign’s decisions.  


  • Davida Tat, a gossip blogger and coder, writes new program that utilizes free 
facial recognition technology to identify plastic surgery. The program scans the web for 
photographs of people whose features line up almost perfectly. The program uses 
metadata from the photographs to determine the date of the photograph and compares 
photographs for matches of seven out of eight measurements – nose, mouth, cheeks, 
forehead, and area around eyes, breast, waist, and ears. If a person changes one of these 
measurements dramatically in a short time period, the two photographs are delivered to 
Davida’s inbox. If upon visual inspection Davida deems the change the work of a 
surgeon, Davida will post the photographs on her blog as before and after shots. Readers 
of the blog are encouraged to provide any details they know about the work, including 
the name of the person and their surgeon.  
    The majority of students at Dale University use the same cell phone provider, 
SY&Y. SY&Y had a major data leak, and cell phone call and text records were released 
for all users in the area surrounding the university. Students from the campus tabloid, the 
Bumpus, downloaded this data set. The same students also pulled the cellphone numbers 
of Dale students from the school’s facebook and students’ accounts on Bookface. These 
lists were cross-referenced with each other to produce a list of who called whom and at 
what times. Using only the weakest of deductions, they were able to publish a “Gettin’ It 
On” list of likely hook-ups, based on number of days that two people exchanged calls 
after 2 AM. They also published “Dale’s Finest,” a list of the twenty male and twenty 
female students who called the largest number of different people after 2 AM in a single 
month. That issue became the most read issue of Bumpus ever.    


  • Walshop uses RFIDs to maintain close records on their more expensive and 
frequently stolen items such as electronics, razor blades and pregnancy tests. Robert 
Whitmore, a stock manager, is walking by a group of Walshop employees on their break 
when his RFID scanner begins picking up a signal. Robert demands to investigate their 
bags to see if they have stolen anything. In Caitlin’s bag, he finds a pregnancy test box 
and one used pregnancy test, which indicated “pregnant.” Caitlin had the paid for the 
test and still had the receipt, so she was not accused of any wrongdoing. However, all of 
her co-workers discovered she was pregnant, so when she later had an abortion it was 
obvious that something had happened. 
Jake Bevelyn and Morgan Mahs were best friends in high school, but since going 
to college they have lost contact. Out of the blue, Jake receives an email saying that 
Morgan posted a photograph of him on a new social networking website. Jakes not a 
member of the site, so in order to view the photograph he must provide significant 
personal information about himself, including his name, birthday, geographic location, 
and educational background. Jake had plenty of photographs taken of him doing 
embarrassing and/or illegal activity when he was younger, so now he must choose 
between certain exposure of personal information or the possibility that that photograph 
may incriminating or embarrassing. 


  • Hillary Baxon applies for a job with Sorgan Manley, a financial powerhouse. In 
the hiring process, Sorgan Manley human resources employees search the Internet for 
information on Hillary Baxon. They find the public profiles of Hillary’s friends, who 
have posted hundreds of photographs and videos. Since the default setting on 
photographs and videos is public, the photographs chronicling Hillary’s frequent bar 
crawls, power hours, and anything-but-clothes (or lack-of-clothes) parties are easily 
found.   


  • Home Depots in California recently began using RFID chips to help keep track 
of quantities, manage shelves, speed up checkout, and generally improve consumer 
experience. Each item in the store has a tiny RFID chip embedded in its packaging. This 
allows Home Depot employees to remotely monitor which goods are running low and 
what shelves need to be re-stocked. Since the RFID chips have a signal radius of ten 
feet, this new technology also makes checkout much easier (no more moving everything 
to that silly conveyor belt!). 
 Julia Twain has been buying enormous quantities of fertilizer over a period of six 
months to help make a bomb. A clever and careful terrorist, Julia has spread her 
purchases out over many Home Depots in California so as to escape the attention of the 
authorities. Once she had gathered enough fertilizer, Julia constructed the bomb and 
placed all the discarded fertilizer bags in opaque, black trash bags on the curb to be 
picked up the next morning by the garbage truck. 
The next morning, a police cruiser drove casually down Julia’s street looking for the a lost cat 
with an RFID chip in its collar. Scanning the yards on the left and right with the 
detectors, Officer Sam Ginsburg noticed an extremely large amount of RFID chips that 
registered as fertilizer bags coming from a pile of trash outside one house. Officer 
Ginsburg examined the house and saw no signs of landscaping or gardening, and the 
quantity of fertilizer was enough to raise suspicions. 
Officer Ginsburg returned the next day with a warrant to search Julia’s and found the 
bomb along with detailed plans for an attack on a nearby subway station. 


• Web-based information aggregator ChoicePoint builds profiles of individuals 
based on information purchased or gathered from a variety of websites that harvest data 
from their users. Chris Smith was applying for a very competitive teaching job at 
Young’s Preschool. After several rounds of interviews, Chris was given the 
disappointing news that he did not get the job. Chris felt that he was far more qualified 
than all the other applicants, so he asked why he was not chosen. The preschool 
disclosed that they contacted ChoicePoint to conduct a background search. The 
information ChoicePoint provided was largely incorrect, including three ex-wives and a 
statutory rape charge. 


• Web-based information aggregator ChoicePoint builds profiles of individuals 
based on information purchased or gathered from a variety of websites that harvest data 
from their users. Chris Smith was applying for a very competitive teaching job at 
Young’s Preschool. After several rounds of interviews, Chris was given the 
disappointing news that he did not get the job. Chris felt that he was far more qualified 
than all the other applicants, so he asked why he was not chosen. The preschool 
disclosed that they contacted ChoicePoint to conduct a background search. The 
information ChoicePoint provided was largely incorrect, including three ex-wives and a 
statutory rape charge. 


• One day, Barb Rasin invests in a new smartphone from the local phone store. 
Excited with her purchase, she rushes home to upload her new phone number to her 
private Facebook profile to alert her friends and family. Strangely, within a few hours 
Barb begins receiving mysterious phone calls from callers asking her sexually explicit 
questions and desiring to meet up. Confused, Barb searches her new phone number on 
the Internet and realizes that Ax Chu, a transvestite hooker, has posted an ad for her 
services on Craiglist but has accidently listed Barb’s new phone number to call. Either 
that, or Barb’s new friends are playing a horrible prank on her.  
 Unfortunately, not only does Barb’s new phone continue ringing off the hook 
with potential suitors, but also unbeknownst to her the data-aggregating, public profile 
site Spokeo has linked information from the Craiglist ad to its listing of her information. 
Quickly, other data-aggregrating, public profile sites also add “transvestite prostitute” to 
Barb’s occupation list. When Barb attempts to email these websites to get this 
information removed, they demand that she send them a copy of driver’s license to 
prove who she is. The problem is, her driver’s license shows her gender to be female, 
and given her occupation, these websites are skeptical that the license is real, so they 
refuse to take her public profiles down.  


• Sylvia Rifkin gets arrested for the misdemeanor charge of interfering with an 
officer during a raid of Levitate night club. Incidental to this arrest, the police scroll 
through her phone as part of a search of her person. In doing so, they find emails 
detailing her close ties to a potentially violent political organization dedicated to saving 
the whales. Intrigued, the officers make a note of these connections, add this information 
to her police file, and release Sylvia. 
 The next time Sylvia is at the airport, TSA sends her through extra security 
because her name is now linked with a suspicious political organization. Undeterred, 
she eventually boards her flight after extra interrogation but is surprised to experience 
the same treatment on her ride home. Upon talking with the Customer Relations desk at 
her home airport, she learns that her new background profile means that she will never 
fly easily again. This is particularly problematic because Sylvia works as a consultant. 
Sylvia must fly frequently as a part of her job and needs to be able to get to urgent 
appointments quickly.  
Some months after the initial change to her profile, Sylvia’s car company client, 
Fonda, demands her immediate presence for crisis management in the wake of an 
impending recall of their new car, the Concord.  When Sylvia attempts to rush through 
the airport with her boss, TSA once again singles her out for super-enhanced security, 
but this time it causes her to miss her flight altogether. Sylvia’s boss, enraged by her 
failure to make the meeting in time and suspicious of the reasons behind Sylvia’s 
detention fires her on the spot.  


  • Jonas Schmonas is an assistant manager at the local UPS branch. Unbeknownst 
to him, he is a distant--but not too distant--relative of the recently deceased billionaire 
Wilson Bumfort. Part of Mr. Bumfort’s will included a clause that $100 million be given 
to each of his living relatives, so his attorneys use ancestry.com to locate these 
Schmonas clicks on them. As soon as he arrives at these sites, the companies collect his 
IP address, name, and web browsing habits through cookies placed on his computer. 
These cookies enable the companies to identify Mr. Schmonas completely and he begins 
receiving paper advertisements through the mail for an array of wealth-related services. 
In spite of Mr. Schmonas’s best efforts to remove himself from these mailing lists, the 
advertisements deluge his office and apartment building, attracting the attention of 
colleagues and neighbors. Sebastian Tark, a local reporter living in Mr. Schmonas’ 
building, takes a special interest in the vast array of wealth-related mailings and decides 
to investigate Mr. Schmonas. During his investigation, Sebastian uses a similar site to 
ancestry.com to uncover the relationship between Mr. Schmonas and Wilson Bumfort. 
With this, Sebastian infers that Mr. Schmonas has indeed received a sizable sum of 
money. 
 Seeing the potential to break a big story, Sebastian writes about his find in the 
local paper, revealing the details of Mr. Schmonas’s mailings as well as the nature of his 
relationship to Wilson Bumfort. Quickly, big media players like The New York Rhymes 
and Washington Roast as well as Mr. Bumfort’s local evening news pick up the story. 
Mr. Schmonas is devastated by this exposure, having immediately received a mix of 
hatemail and ingratiating emails that affirmed his worst fears that his new wealth would 
harm his friendships. 
 Worse still, local thieves learn of the new money in their midst. They Google 
Mr. Schmonas’s home on Google Earth, verifying not only his address but also his 
complete lack of home security. So, that night just as Mr. Schmonas is lying back to 
have an evening drink to take the edge off the night, these men break into his apartment 
and rob him of all his belongings.  


• Sophia Landa goes streaking through the library as part of the annual Jale 
University naked finals run. While she normally would never partake in this sort of 
activity, her friends convince her by explaining that the “audience” will be only be other 
students who have key-card access to the library. Unfortunately, Sophia fails to 
anticipate the interest of the night-shift security guard, who records her on his camera 
phone as she runs past him. Before she even gets back to her dorm later that night, the 
security guard has uploaded the video for the entire public to see, making Sophia’s 
somewhat-private run into an international peep-show. Horrified, Sophia’s parents pull 
her out of school even as the general public online quickly traces her identity using the 
name of her University as well as the semi-public directory that the University posts 
online. Searches of “Sophia Landa” now turn up more Google videos of her naked run 
than she could ever hope to have taken down. 


  • Tale-New Baven Hospital releases a set of de-identified patient treatment data. 
Unfortunately, the data contains gender and tracks the progression of each person’s 
disease with the dates of different appointments. University students at MIT want to 
make a point about how de-identified data is definitely not non-identifiable. They put it 
together with publically available GPS data and personal information from the social 
networking site, ThreeTriangle. This allows them to identify some of the individual 
patients, including Mary Gibbs. Through a simple algorithm, it is now publically known 
that Mary Gibbs has HIV/AIDS.   


  • Doel Circus lends his laptop to his friend, Dobby Bresser, to check his online 
bank statement. Dobby failed to press the tab button hard enough to switch from the 
“user name” field to the “password” field. As a result, he types her username 
(DBresser1992) and password (password1234) into the same box. BankofUSA.com 
cookies record this information to make it easier for the next time Dobby visits the site 
from that computer. The next time Doel goes to BankofUSA.com and types “d” into the 
user name field, Dobby’s username and password friend pop up.

 
  • Ax Zho just got a new job with Orange Media.  A big user of the new social 
networking site, StatusUpdate, Ax posts about his new job right away. Considering his 
new employment status, he makes sure to edit his privacy settings so that unapproved 
users cannot see any of his photos or statuses. 
 Ax starts his new job, and while he loves most things about it, he quickly 
develops a deep hatred for his immediate supervisor.  Because no one at the company is 
linked to him on StatusUpdate, he starts to post hateful comments about his supervisor 
under the username AxZho as early as his second day of work.  At the very end of its 
privacy policy, StatusUpdate includes a clause that reads: “We reserve the right to 
change this Privacy Policy at any time.”  Three weeks into his new employment, 
StatusUpdate changes it’s privacy settings so that users have to specifically opt out of 
sharing current statuses, past statuses, and statuses that are more than two weeks 
old.  There is no way to know this change occurred unless users visit the Privacy Policy 
on StatusUpdate.com to check for changes.  Employees at the company who also use 
StatusUpdate.com on a daily basis discover Ax Zho’s two week-old posts, and word of 
his feelings quickly gets around.  Eventually it reaches his supervisor and Ax is 
promptly fired. 


  • One fine summer day, a Bank of America in Manhattan was robbed. Three 
armed men in ski masks burst through the doors shortly after 2:00 pm, waving machine 
guns and shouting demands. They were out the door with bags full of cash in under ten 
minutes, but they did not realize that the silent alarm had been sounded the instant they 
entered the bank. 
 As they sped away in their getaway van, a handful of police cars followed. But 
before the van could get more than ten blocks from the bank, the robbers encountered a 
road block set up by the police and were forced to pull over. The police forced the three 
of them out of the van and took them into the station. 
 Once in custody, the robbers had their smartphones confiscated. Two were 
locked, so the police dumped the contents of the phones’ hard drives and then examined 
the data. They found a significant number of text messages between the three criminals 
planning the operation.  
The third phone was not password-protected, and the police has free reign over 
its contents. They scoured the criminal’s emails, which contained a large number of 
receipts and confirmations from various banks. Curious, they logged into the phone’s 
owner’s bank account from the smartphone using the saved password on the bank’s 
mobile site. Information found in the online account provided incriminating evidence 
that linked the detainee to various money laundering operations, a significant amount of 
fraud, and a series of other armed robberies in the area.