Public Internet/Private Lives.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Internet privacy laws

Everything on the Internet has the potential of being read and misused by others. States must decide how to protect people without stifling e-commerce.

The death of 20-year-old Amy Boyer may not be the single reason why advocates for increased Internet privacy are suddenly being heard, but it certainly added impetus to the movement.

On a fall afternoon in October 1999, Boyer was getting ready to pull out of the parking lot near the dentist's office where she worked part-time when she heard someone yell her name.

According to a report filed with the Nashua, N.H., police, Amy turned to her left to see a distraught young man pointing a semiautomatic firearm at her face. He fired at her 11 times before taking his own life.

Citizens of the normally quiet and safe Nashua were horrified by the news of the young woman's death. But to Internet privacy advocates, Boyers' sudden, violent end was a horrendous example of how information gathered over the 'Net can be used for a terrible purpose. Boyers' stalker, 21-year-old Liam Youens, not only obtained her Social security number and workplace address via the Internet, he, incredibly, posted a Web site in which he publicly detailed his intention of killing the young woman.

"I have always lusted for the death of Amy," Youens wrote in one chilling posting. He disclosed how he planned to murder Boyers: "When she gets in, I'll drive up to her car blocking her in, window to window, I'll shoot her with my Glock."

Days after Boyers' death, New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg announced he was cosponsoring legislation outlawing the on-line sale of Social Security numbers. But the strongest response to Boyers' murder came from her stepfather, Tim Remsberg, who appeared before a Senate subcommittee studying privacy issues last spring and demanded more stringent policing of the 'Net.

"We must show Amy that we care about what happened to her," Remsberg said, "and that we are going to act to see it doesn't happen to another."

At the same time, Remsberg publicly blamed Tripod and Geocities, the service providers that hosted Youens' site, while also filing a wrongful death suit against Docusearch.com, where Youens' received the information about Boyer's whereabouts. He claimed negligence and invasion of privacy.

"They should be monitoring sites where the word 'kill' is used," Remsberg later said of Geocities and Tripod. "Bring up every site that has the word 'murder,' the word 'rape,' the word 'bondage.'"

PROMOTING ON-LINE SAFETY

For many, including a growing number of sites dedicated to promoting on-line safety such as WHOA, Women Halting Online Abuse, the death of Amy Boyer underlines a haunting proposition: Nothing in the new frontiers of cyberspace is really confidential, and everything written or communicated has the potential of being read and misused by others.

"The Internet and cyberspace right now are very much like the wild, wild West," remarks California Senator Debra Bowen, a strong privacy supporter. "There are no rules governing behavior and commerce. And, of course, that is both the wonderful as well as the dangerous thing about it."

Says Emily Hackett, state policy director with the Internet Alliance in Washington, D.C.: "This is a world that remains a big mystery to many people, people who don't know how information about them gets processed, where it goes and how to stop it. It's a new technology that has opened up all sorts of new questions and practices in terms of how people behave and what is or is not legal behavior."

For Ellen Rony, a cyberspace expert and the author of The Domain Name Handbook--High Stakes and Strategies in Cyberspace, the question of Internet privacy is almost beside the point in a world where personal information is casually shared by a variety of entities.

"We have already relinquished a large part of our...