Stalking-Enabled

Posted on February 1, 2005 in Clueless Oafs Internet Privacy Scoundrels

I must second the concern which many women programmers and bloggers raise about the male-domination of the Net. Take the matter of Google linking the capability to look up phone numbers with mapping software. It’s the men who ask “what is the big deal?”

I am one of the few men who has suffered being stalked. It was only for a matter of hours, but I must say that the experience left its mark on me. Someone who wouldn’t go away until he got what he wanted which was sex. Women know about this. Some have had it happen more than once. A few men get it when they see just how far one of these louts can go. Take for example the police officers who showed up at the house of a friend to find her stalker literally tunneling his way into her garage. He made up a story about how they’d had an argument. She wouldn’t answer the door because she thought it might be him. So the cops let him go. Then they saw the damage he’d done to her garage.

I get it because I have been there. But blessed are those who have not been through it and yet understand. Which leaves out two out of the three men who commented on the No Hoax post, one of whom just politely expressed puzzlement and the other of whom rolled out the standard conservative “it’s alarmist” line.

It’s true that after years of abuse, some women become too paranoid for their own good. They become fearful of all men. That’s not the case, however, when it comes to concern about personal safety in these United States. What women want to block is access to information about their whereabouts. Google makes it too damn easy to link a phone number to an address or an address to a phone number. It shares common ground with date rape in that the seekers of the information don’t want to have to obtain the woman’s permission. In date rape, the logic runs “You agreed to go out with me, so you agreed to fuck.” In this, the sweep widens to “You exist, you have an address and phone number, so you have agreed to let me have the information.”

Personally, I think both phone companies and search engines go about this backwards. That information should begin as private. If they want to publish it, they should ask my permission without insisting on an extra charge. I want control over my own information. I want to determine who gets to have it and who does not.

The dismal response to this is “If you don’t like this system, you don’t have to have a phone.” Which is like the reasoning of an economics professor I had back in my days at Claremont Men’s College (now Clarence McKenna College): “there’s a substitute for everything and the substitute for food is starvation.” Yeah, right. Like I really want to buy into being an economic outcast by choosing not to have a phone.

Here comes the what-if: if women had designed the telephone system and its child the Net, would this feature exist? The issue here is what rights do we have over our own persons? In the male-view, it seems, not a lot.

Which is why I tend to prefer the company of women.