Garbage

 

Image from Pixabay

A while ago we had Corrie, Dudley and Eunice over. They were uninvited guests who beat the big drum. Eunice even killed four people in the Netherlands alone. Along with Dudley, this storm killed even more people in neighboring countries.

On one of these windy days, the orange wheelie bin was scheduled for collection. This is where PMD waste goes: plastic and metal packaging and drinking cartons. The garbage truck has an arm on the side that can lift two bins at once and then hold them upside down over an opening on top of the truck. In normal weather conditions, the waste falls neatly into the truck. But this time numerous pieces of plastic, over which the wind had more power than gravity, were blowing through the street.

We also have a blue wheelie bin. Paper waste goes in there and it is emptied in the same way as the orange container. What if the blue bin had been on the waste calendar? Would all kinds of documents with my name on them have been whirling around? Not such a nice thought. We may have nothing to hide, in the sense of: we don't do things that are inappropriate, but there are plenty of things that are none of other people’s business.

We used to feed everything that contained personal data into the paper shredder. That device broke down at some point and at the same time the stream of paper documents dried up considerably. The mailman visited our house only sporadically; his work was largely taken over by email and download portals. In short, the paper shredder was not replaced and the paper waste – now rather scarce – with our data on it 'just' goes in the wheelie bin. And I think that always goes well. Unless some Dudley comes along. Or someone is looking for information about us and does some dumpster diving.

As an information processing organization you cannot afford to put your paper waste on the street. Sooner or later that would cause trouble, if only because of the fact that there is paper with personal data among your waste – the rest of the leaked information does not even have to be flashy to make it into the newspapers. Such organizations have contracts with companies that dispose of and destroy the waste paper in a responsible manner.

What applies to paper, applies to computer files to an even greater extent. A colleague recently sent me a newspaper clipping from 1983, in which a commentator of the Leeuwarder Courant sighed under the heading 'Privacy talk' that it is remarkable “how that concept of privacy crops up time and again when it comes to computer files on personal numbers and never when it comes to card indexes with the same data in alphabetical order”. But this writer had understood it well early on: “In practice it may be different, because it is possible to transfer computer data quickly”. And in large quantities, you can safely add to that.

In 2004, public prosecutor Joost Tonino put his old computer, which no longer worked due to a virus infection, on the street for the waste collection. And of course someone took that device before the garbage truck came along and he just got the device working. The computer was full of confidential information, which found its way to Peter R. de Vries, a well-known crime reporter (who was murdered last year). A scandal was born. Newspaper Trouw wrote about this: “Rarely has a civil servant – even better, a magistrate – been so spanked by politics in public as yesterday's Amsterdam public prosecutor Joost Tonino.” If only he had read that Leeuwarder Courant… (Tonino was about 17 when the article appeared, so he just might have read it.)

As a good citizen you will rarely have to deal with dumpster diving. However, if you did something terribly wrong, the police might become very interested in your blue wheelie bin. But, depending on what you've been up to, your computer is probably much more interesting to them. The newspaper clipping also stated: “Anyone who has nothing to hide need not be afraid that he will appear in such a computer file, and that data from one file will be superimposed on that of another.” It doesn’t work like that anymore: everyone has something to hide, everyone is in countless files and if there’s one thing computers can do well, it is to connect data. That piece appeared one year too early in the newspaper.

This blog post has been translated from Dutch to English by Google and edited by the author.

  

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English. 

• Two men have been arrested for trading personal data of thousands of people. [IN DUTCH]
• the government gives insight into the sharing of personal data. [IN DUTCH]
• leaked Samsung source code contained thousands of secret keys and passwords.
• Ukraine believes that Russian state hackers are overrated.
• the German government is now also done with the antivirus software from the Russian company Kaspersky. [IN DUTCH]
• a report on the (un)safety of mobile equipment in 2021 was published.
• this businessman lost a lot of money because of an e-mail from the 'tax authorities'. [IN DUTCH]
• the FBI provides tips against help desk fraud. [IN DUTCH]
• Zoom has addressed several important privacy risks. [IN DUTCH]
• the government is investigating to what extent it can and should tap into chat services. [IN DUTCH]
• your microwave thinks it's a steam oven after a software update. [IN DUTCH]