“There is no privacy!” On the confidentiality of personal information

I was just mulling over a post on pri­vacy when, out of nowhere, a rather inter­est­ing piece of spam landed in one of my work mailboxes. (How about that!)

Dear Parshin,

I Barrister Edwin Roland (esquire), lawyer in law.personal lawyer Mr.Robert Parshin, who was con­trac­tor of European devel­op­ment after company.Herein shall be trans­ferred with my client, on September 11, 2001 my client was involved in world trade center bombing.unfortunately died three months after the inci­dent, due to injuries he sub­stained as result of explo­sion, since then I have made sev­eral inquiries to your embassy to find any of my client’s extended rel­a­tives, but it was unsuccessful.

After these sev­eral unsuc­cess­ful attempts, I decided to track your sur­name to find any of his rel­a­tives, con­se­quently I con­tacted of you to pro­vide assis­tance in repa­tri­a­tion of fund in amount of 10.5 mil­lion US dol­lars, left by my client, until it is con­fis­cated or declared unser­vice­able by finan­cial secu­rity firm in Lome / Togo, where this huge sum was deposited for keep­ing in trunk box under the sphere of family valuables. Said secu­rity com­pany issued me notice to pro­vide next of kin or this square con­fis­cated within next 21 offi­cial work­ing days, as they do not know con­tents of the box.

Since I unsuc­cess­fully in search of rel­a­tives more than 9years now, I ask your con­sent to present you as next of kin of the deceased, so that pro­ceed­ings of this window may be trans­ferred to you.Therefore on receipt of your pos­i­tive answer, we shall then dis­cuss using coef­fi­cient and con­di­tions of trans­fer, as I have all nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion and legal doc­u­ments required for You by for claim.

All that I demand from you your honest coop­er­a­tions to allow us to see this deal to end. I guar­an­tee that this will be car­ried out under lawful arrange­ment which will pro­tect you from any breach of law.

Thank you for your quick answer.

Barr. Edwin Roland

Principal prosecutors

A typ­i­cal Nigerian scam letter… It would all be fine if the letter had come to my per­sonal Gmail inbox, which actu­ally does con­tain my surname.

But the thing is, my work mail runs on Google Apps, its address is made of the domain name and the word “biz”, and it doesn’t con­tain my surname. What’s more, I’ve never used my sur­name together with that mail­box any­where in pub­li­ca­tions (or ads). The only time, nat­u­rally, was reg­is­ter­ing the mail­box with Google. There’s a form there where they ask for your surname. The form is sent over an unse­cured con­nec­tion (http), and I have three explanations:

  1. The spam­mers some­how read this data when the mail­box was reg­is­tered (by installing some­thing on my side, for example);
  2. The spam­mers tracked down my sur­name in some intel­li­gent way (by hand, for exam­ple) and linked it to this mailbox;
  3. Google sold my account data to spam­mers (it’s free, by the way).

The ques­tion remains open. The sub­ject of pri­vacy (or rather its absence) remains undisclosed.

I rec­om­mend watch­ing a video on the sub­ject: Steven Rambam. Privacy is Dead - Get Over It (in English, on Vimeo), or the translated text on Habr, the Russian-language tech community.

A Habr user called noonesshadow was appar­ently so impressed that he did an incred­i­ble job of turn­ing the video into Russian text :) Great honor to him for that. Give him an upvote, those of you who are on Habr :)