Elevators that identify and trap criminals. New friends that turn out to be computers. Garfinkel's speculations are sometimes wild, but not completely unfounded. He first became interested in privacy when his social security number was mixed up with his deceased grandfather's. When he got a job and started earning money, the Social Security Administration stopped the benefits his grandmother had been receiving.
Privacy breaches can happen even when companies have honorable intentions.
Wired News reports that when Surfmonkey tried to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, they inadvertently overstepped it. In the process of obtaining parents' permission to host their children's email accounts, a database glitch caused the entire list of kids' addresses to be sent in the body of the email. However, most privacy violations occur when companies mishandle information collected for market research, an area where the privacy lines are especially unclear. The privacy issue creates an interesting opportunity for open source applications. As Garfinkel points out, software's hidden features aren't always written with the interests of the end user at heart.