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EditorialThey say that ancient Egypt was a lot like modern times because they worshipped cats and wrote on walls.  That certainly applies to people I know on Facebook.  And now it applies to a Web site called 'I know Where Your Cat Is.'  As if the careless invasion of our own privacy wasn't enough, now our cats have to worry about their own privacy.

The site culls public information from a plethora of social Web sites, searching for the word 'cat' and then grabbing location information in order to place a million pictures of cats on an interactive Google map.

I am glad to see that my own cats are not on the 'I Know Where Your Cat Lives' site.  I am not the sort who regularly posts pictures of cats on the Internet.  I opt, instead, to mock my friends who do.  I noticed that the majority of cats located in Lansing show up in the Village of Lansing, rather than the Town.  There's a demographic you probably haven't read before: Village of Lansing cats are more likely to be outed by their owners than Town of Lansing cats.

iknowwhereyourcatlives400This cat lives on Cinema Drive near the Triphammer Marketplace in the Village of Lansing. Click to view the site.

"We set out on this adventure with a mission in mind: to point out the ease of access to data and photos on the web," the site owners tell us.  "We sought to showcase how readily available social media users’ information and snapshots are to the general public.  This project explores two uses of the internet: the sociable and humorous appreciation of domesticated felines, and the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all."

That last bit is alarming, that megacorps are taking advantage of our social and humorous good nature to gather information about us that it can sell.  Recently I have had some truly alarming and downright creepy experiences of this.

In March I learned that UPS has a free service called UPS My Choice®, that provides enhanced tracking for your packages.  It sends you emails with updates on when you can expect your package to be delivered, and you can log in to the UPS site to update delivery instructions or request a delivery change on computers and mobile devices.  All in all it's a handy service that I like a lot.

But when I signed up I had a shock: to confirm my identity the site asked questions that were both personal and specific.  One question asked me to remember a street I lived on in 1977 -- I didn't live there very long, and I can't remember the name of the street.  I had to take a lucky guess on that one.  UPS apparently knows things about me that I don't even know!

I have to admit I was torn.  On the one hand I wanted to reap the benefits of this wonderful free service.  On the other hand I didn't want to answer personal questions.  In the end I opted to answer them, since it was evident UPS already knew the answers to them.

But I was upset enough to ask Customer Service where they got their information about me.

"The validation questions used to verify your identity are randomly generated based on information available in public records," a Customer Service Representative named Lisa replied. "This information may include utility bills, DMV records, mortgage and deed information, etc. The questions are produced by a vendor who is a leading provider in the personal validation industry. UPS cannot change or filter the validation questions."

'A vendor who is a leading provider in the personal validation industry'... translate that to 'MegaCorp' making a fortune by selling information about me that I had no idea was even public.  Although I am happy to report that they didn't ask me about my cats.

Have you Googled yourself lately?  I probably have posted more words on the Internet than most people, but only a few years ago there wasn't a whole lot of information about me, and certainly very few pictures.  I don't do it very often, so I was shocked recently when I Googled my name and saw how much of me is out there.  I didn't post most of the pictures, but they are there just the same.  And page after page of references to me, some of them so old I forgot they existed.

Some countries are trying to force Google to allow their citizens to 'erase themselves' from the search results if they want to.   A European Court of Justice ruling in May required search engines to remove links to information when people complain thatinformation about themselves is outdated.  Since the ruling Google has reportedly received more than 70,000 ­requests impacting about 250,000 websites, and is working down a backlog of requests.

In today's society we are so used to being constantly observed that we rarely think twice about the dramatic absence of privacy that has become an accepted fact of life over the past decade or two.  I always try to smile at the ATM, although I can't figure out which mirror the camera is hiding behind.

Identity theft is the sexy misuse of all this information -- it makes the news all the time.  But the fact is that it is only a symptom of the vast incursions into our privacy that we seem to accept every day.  We are all out there naked for all to see if 'all' knows where to look, and oh boy! are they looking!.  it is bad enough we have cat burglers.  Now we are going to have cat identity theft?!

This is bad for us.  Now it's also bad for cats.

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