Catalog Technology May Spike Net Users’ Privacy

John Kaufman didn’t know he was being followed.

No dark sedans tailed his car, no mysterious clicks interrupted his phone calls. But every word he typed in the deepest corners of the Internet was being downloaded by an obsessive stalker.

Kaufman was well aware that his posts and ruminations were considered public on Usenet, a global bulletin board made up of more than 15,000 separate discussion groups on every topic imaginable. He meant to reach a worldwide audience, after all.

But what surprised him was the ease with which someone who’d taken such an overwhelming interest in his life was able to track down everything he’d ever said online.

It’s a realization many people are having, now that the rules of the game have changed. In the last year, a new and powerful generation of search programs have begun to systematically index the entire Internet--making it possible for the first time to find just about anything if a request is sufficiently precise.

The story that Kaufman relates started innocently enough: He had posted a note on a local computer bulletin board in December about a program he wanted to sell. A woman e-mailed that she was interested, they agreed on a price and, a few days later, she stopped by his apartment to pick it up.

Everything seemed normal, he said, until the next day.

“She sent me e-mail saying she’d conducted a search of Usenet, looking at the posts I’d made, and she was very interested in me and the things I’d done,” Kaufman said.

Kaufman, a San Francisco-based writer whose words have appeared in numerous national magazines, also takes part in many of the free-floating conversations on Usenet.

It was those words that came back to haunt him when his admirer began sending him daily e-mail messages, often commenting on things that he’d posted in newsgroups on topics ranging from Latin American politics to the weather in the Shetland Islands.

Finally, in January, she sent a message that shook him badly--a three-page letter that basically was a dossier of his entire life.

“She’s pieced together the puzzle of my life from Usenet. She knows my mother was a concert pianist. She knows what I wanted to be when I was growing up--all because of Usenet, from postings and discussions I’ve had there,” said Kaufman, who is gay--a fact also known to the woman.

“When this thing flashed on the screen, my mouth dropped open,” he said. “Here was a total stranger who knew my cat’s name.”

The problem with the Internet had always been that while the wisdom of the world might be contained within it, there was no way to figure out exactly what was there. It was like the Library of Congress without a card catalog.

Where once it would have been almost impossible to read through the millions of messages posted daily to the various newsgroups to find one by a particular person, services such as Deja News now sift through that 580 megabytes of data in seconds and supply an “Author Profile” of any given person.

These profiles list the number of original posts that an author has made (called “articles” on Usenet), their percentage of follow-up posts and a complete listing of every newsgroup they’ve taken part in. Simply clicking on a listing brings their original post to your screen.

“I think this is a situation where there has been a great step forward in technology, but how we absorb it into society and use it responsibly hasn’t quite been defined yet,” said Lori Fena, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based online rights organization.

“The rules have changed, but people’s actions haven’t changed. Before,” she said of posting, “it was a public act in a private room. These new search engines are going back into those private rooms, listening to the recordings and making everything said there available to everyone else.”

Legally, there doesn’t appear to be a problem with these new search tools and archives.

Someone writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper gives an implied license that it be published. Someone posting to the most assuredly public forum of Usenet would have every reason to believe that his or her words would be re-sent around the globe.

“The courts will probably find some kind of implied license. As you posted it for thousands of people to read, it would be hard to convince the court that it was private,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor specializing in online issues at UCLA.

But different services take different stands on just how public those old posts were.

Usenet began in 1979, but the services that index it started up only in the last year. Digital Equipment Corp.’s Alta Vista search program keeps only the last month or so of Usenet live online.

“We think Usenet is like a conversation. It’s not something that should be kept forever to haunt you. Say some student posts something about Microsoft being the big evil empire and then, two years later in a suit and a tie, they’re applying for a job there,” said Louis Monier, lead scientist of the Alta Vista project, based in Palo Alto.

But down in Austin, Texas, Deja News is trying hard to be the memory of Usenet. Since May 1995, the tiny start-up company has been offering an ever-growing full-text index of Usenet.

If you said something about iguanas in 1986 in the rec.pets newsgroup, they want the rest of the world to be able to find it. Deja News plans on having a complete index going back to 1979 by the end of this year.

Normally, Usenet postings last only a few days or weeks, depending on how busy a particular newsgroup is. As new messages come in, old ones are purged from the system. It used to be that if you didn’t read a message when it first was posted, you were out of luck.

Backup tapes on computer systems nationwide contain older chunks of Usenet, however, just like stacks of newspapers in someone’s basement. By piecing together various backups, Deja News plans to have an archive of every newsgroup since its inception.

That can come as something of a shock to people who thought their words were gone forever.

“I’ve certainly gotten some irate mail,” said George D. Nicas, the service’s user liaison.

To deal with the problem, Deja News will delete the contents of old posts at the request of the person who wrote them. In addition, it is putting together a feature that will allow Usenet users to keep their messages out of the index by including the words “no-archive” in the addressing information at the start of their post.

Nicas said the service also plans to do a mass posting to all 15,000 newsgroups, telling people that their words are being archived and how to use the no-archive header.

“Even if we didn’t index it, 30 million people could read it, but we’re instituting this feature anyway,” he said.

But in the end, Volokh said, the only true privacy is silence.

“If you don’t want something to be known,” he said, “don’t put it in a medium where thousands of strangers can see it.”

As for John Kaufman, after he sent his stalker strongly worded e-mail, weeks went by without any response.

But he knows that she’s still out there.