"Does not compute:" Celebrity anonymity and the internet

http://www.exposed.su.

This URL - like all others - is an auspicious collection of letters and punctuation on its own. Not much of a threat, is it?

Yet, if you have been in touch with the news within the last week, it would have been hard to miss that this innocuous group of symbols stood for something far more sinister - the unlawful publication of sensitive, private information of notable figures (both political and entertainment-oriented), gained through methods of cyberterrorism.

I say cyberterrorism - as, in effect, that's what it is - but reports suggest that no significant cracking was necessary for the malicious parties to access the data that they publicized. Credit monitoring company Experian PLC's press statement summed it up quite well: "Criminals accessed personal credential information through various outside sources, which provided them with sufficient information to illegally access a limited number of individual reports from some US credit reporting agencies."

In short, private information of less security relevance - birthdates, addresses, and family connections, to name a few - were compiled and used in order to access account data through the same login portal as the general public would use.

Heck, even nobodies like us have our age and a reasonably current city location publicized on MyLife.com for the whole world to see - whether you are involved in social media (ever-accused by the general public of being the premiere source of private information on the internet, despite the fact that the Facebook user is the party to blame for voluntarily filling out their personal life in the form boxes) or not.

By comparison, consider the mounds of private dirt about film or television personalities that winds up on the public side of the internet. You don't even have to go past the free version of the Internet Movie Database to find out that Sophia Loren has an apartment in the Trump World Tower in New York City, and learn the names of her three grandchildren and respective parents (not to mention that "[e]verything you see is owed to spaghetti").

Perhaps this case is the perfect example to drive home the point that "internet security" and "privacy" are complete fallacies, especially to the person involved in the entertainment industry. There are no such things, only limited safeguards. One-way and hash encryption can be quite secure, but they are no match for someone behind that wall of encryption (an insider), or plain and simple ingenuity (as with the exposed.su case).

In short - there is no such thing as privacy on the internet for celebrities.

But who needs a celebrity? If you've filled out every single form box in your Facebook personal profile in your pajamas at 5:00 in the morning, you might become one too*.

-Kurt Kaminer

*Especially if your profile states you're a 25-year-old single woman in Miami with an interest in men who like old muscle cars. I'll be aggregating that data. Personally.

To read more about internet privacy:

• Sensible E-Marketing: Is Online Privacy the Ultimate Oxymoron?