schachterrific!

You find it on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on MySpace. Its there with every online purchase you make, with almost every social network you join. It’s slapped across every survey you take, and it sits in the shadows of every doctor’s appointment you make.

Data Collection. Well, privacy is dead.

Data collection has come home to roost, folks.

In today’s Sarasota Herald Tribune, Noam Cohen puts the nails in privacy’s coffin with a look at how information about A-Rod’s steroid abuse found its way from a “blind” survey to the front page:

The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party data collection. We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.

It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as “anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr. Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them.

Read this story and weep, not for Mr. Rodriguez, but for your own privacy… gone like milkweed in the wind.

Makes me want to return my EZ-Pass….