Judge's Internet Snafu Highlights Accidental Data Sharing Risks

Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has been thrust into the media spotlight after his own private collection of photographs and videos was accidentally made available on the Internet.

Kozinski told a reporter from the LA Times that he thought the material on his Web site, which included photographs and videos of a sexual nature, couldn't be seen by the public.

While the story has attracted widespread attention, particularly since Judge Kozinski is currently presiding over a major obscenity trial in Los Angeles, it serves to highlights a significant problem in the area of data privacy. People often unintentionally post data to the Internet, either accidentally, or thinking that it is protected against unauthorized access.

Users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing tools are particularly at risk because these programs make it easy to share files with strangers on the Internet. In 2007, researchers from Dartmouth University discovered thousands of files with sensitive user information on a popular P2P network. One spreadsheet they found contained over 23,000 business accounts from a major bank, including account numbers, names and addresses.

A 2007 report issued by The United States Patent and Trademark Office confirmed the risks, stating that "government employees or contractors who had installed file-sharing programs on their home or work computers... repeatedly compromised national and military security by sharing files containing sensitive or classified data."

Congress also looked into this issue last year, with a House Committee hearing on the national security risks posed by P2P accidental data sharing.

The take-home lesson from these cases is that private data and the Internet do not mix. Whether it is shared via P2P software or intentionally uploaded to a password-protected photo sharing or social network site, the end result is the same — your data may not stay private for long.

Just ask Paris Hilton, whose private photos have repeatedly been hacked and stolen — first, from her Internet-connected mobile phone, and then later, from her private Facebook profile.

Or alternatively, consider the thousands of MySpace users whose private photos were leaked onto the Internet after flaws in the company's private photo protection feature were discovered by hackers.

If you have files or documents that you want to stay private or could be embarrassing if revealed to the general public, take extreme care when you store them on an Internet connected computer. Furthermore, even if a website promises to keep your data private, you should think twice before uploading your files.