@LARGE
Preserving privacy

By Scott Kirsner

Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold.

Honestly, I just couldn't get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software.

Then I met Richard M. Smith.

Smith is a Brookline resident and the chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit. Smith is mild-mannered -- a typically introverted techie, unless he is standing in front of an audience. (He has addressed the CIA and testified before Congress, and next month he'll speak at the first Conference of the Privacy Officers Association in Washington.) With his shaggy salt-and-pepper beard, he looks like a character out of an Edward Koren New Yorker cartoon.

He's a self-confessed ''gadget person,'' with a special interest in what gizmos know about their users. A digital pedometer that reports the length and frequency of your exercise sessions to its manufacturer may sound innocuous, until the maker starts selling that data to your HMO. Tiny, Net-compatible cameras and global positioning transmitters are democratizing surveillance and turning anyone with a few hundred bucks into an unlicensed private investigator. And did you know that your TiVo personal video recorder phones home with information about everything you watch -- even what buttons you press on the remote?

''We're getting into territories that human beings haven't been in before,'' Smith told an audience at the Eleventh Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy last month in Cambridge. ''It will be interesting to see how it plays out.''

Smith doesn't intend to be a passive bystander. Through his work with the Privacy Foundation, he plans to force companies to be more forthright about how their products work; prod government and law enforcement agencies to be more responsible in their use of new surveillance technologies; and raise awareness among once-apathetic consumers like me.

Over lunch last week at a Japanese restaurant in Coolidge Corner, near his home office, Smith ran down a list of the issues on his mind. The Privacy Foundation had just published a report that highlighted some discrepancies between what TiVo says it does and what actually happens, and Smith was interested in conducting a similar investigation of DirecTV, which, like TiVo, uses a phone line to transmit information from the home to the service's operator.

A new generation of data-capture pens, from companies like Anoto and Wellesley's N-Scribe, will allow users to beam handwriting directly into laptops or cell phones. How easy, Smith wonders, will it be to tap into those data streams and virtually read over someone's shoulder?

He's curious when we'll see the next implementation of the face-scanning system tested at January's Super Bowl. Developed in part by Raytheon and a small MIT start-up called Visage Technology, it scanned everyone passing through the turnstiles and showed probable matches between attendees and known criminals on the screens of a police control room.

''That's something that seems useful at an event where there's a high likelihood of terrorism, and this was probably a warm-up for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics,'' Smith says. ''But there's never been a terrorist incident at the Super Bowl, and they didn't let anyone know they were doing this.''

Smith is an extraordinary provocateur. Someone else has apparently laid claim to the title ''The Ralph Nader of Privacy,'' but that's essentially what Smith is. He's a Toto-esque puller-back of curtains. He's beloved by reporters around the world for the scoops he feeds them. The firms he investigates seem to respect his authority, and it's hardly ever a problem for Smith to get a direct e-mail correspondence going with the CEO.

Smith believes we're at an interesting juncture in privacy. Many dot-coms whose business plans involved using the Internet to gather and extract value out of incredibly detailed information about Web users have disappeared or fallen on tough times.

''A lot of the attempts at personal profiling and information gathering have failed, and I'm not sure why,'' Smith says. It could be the generally skeptical investment environment - how much is the information about my preferred brand of toothpaste really worth? - and it could be that the sheer volume and granularity of the data was too much for marketers to handle. Most marketers are still mastering the problem of targeting their pitches to certain ZIP codes; sending out individualized e-mails or banner ads based on the car you drive is beyond them.

But even as Internet data-gatherers flail about and flame out, there's reason to be concerned about how government agencies, law enforcement authorities, and our employers can gain access to the things that networks know about us.

There are no clear rules, for example, about how the police can use information from FastLane to confirm your whereabouts at a specific time or date. Or how they can conduct location-tapping, a new form of wire-tapping made possible by the FCC's Enhanced 911 program, which enables cell phones to report their location within 100 feet (and which debuts in October). The system is designed to be used to find you only in an emergency, but law enforcement agencies will be quick to come up with other applications.

''We don't know yet what the legal standards will be,'' Smith says. ''Can you use that location information to help in a murder investigation? Or can you use it to find someone who has a stack of unpaid parking tickets?''

Smith's objective isn't to turn everyone into privacy paranoiacs. Rather, he wants to make people aware of the potential for new networks and devices to reveal more about us than we'd like. And he'd like to see more individuals expressing their views to legislators and manufacturers about the appropriate bounds of privacy.

It's great to have watchdogs like Smith and the Privacy Foundation on our side, and the foundation's Web site (www.privacyfoundation.org) is an excellent resource for staying up to speed on privacy-related debates. Their work - along with our response to it and participation in it - seems certain to influence the kind of world we'll live in 10 years from today.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.