https://www.npr.org/2019/03/10/702028545/googling-strangers-one-professors-lesson-on-privacy-in-public-spaces

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Googling Strangers: One Professor's Lesson On Privacy In Public
Spaces Kate Klonick asked her law students at St. John's University
to try to identify people they came across in public, based solely on
what they said and wore. It was surprisingly easy.
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Googling Strangers: One Professor's Lesson On Privacy In Public
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Googling Strangers: One Professor's Lesson On Privacy In Public
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March 10, 20193:21 PM ET

Francesca Paris

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Scott Simon

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Googling Strangers: One Professor's Lesson On Privacy In Public
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Kate Klonick, assistant professor of law at St. John's University,
gave her students an optional assignment for spring break: Try to
identify a stranger based solely on what they reveal in public.
Above, strangers commuting in London. Classen Rafael / EyeEm/Getty
Images/EyeEm hide caption

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Classen Rafael / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm

Kate Klonick, assistant professor of law at St. John's University,
gave her students an optional assignment for spring break: Try to
identify a stranger based solely on what they reveal in public.
Above, strangers commuting in London.

Classen Rafael / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm

Charlotte Lehman could hear the man reading his credit card number
out loud from across the Starbucks.

He was speaking to a companion, but his voice carried over the music
to where Lehman sat. Surrounded by a dozen or so people, the speaker
also divulged his phone number and home address.

After that, all it took for Lehman to identify him was a quick Google
search. She was able to find the man's full name, what he does for a
living and his professional website. She even heard him sharing a
password.

Lehman, a third year law student, wasn't Googling the stranger for
fun. She was on a homework assignment from her professor -- to
"de-anonymize" someone in a public place.

Kate Klonick, assistant professor of law at St. John's University,
where Lehman studies, says she gave her students the task as an
optional assignment for spring break. The goal: Try to identify a
person based solely on what they reveal in public, including anything
displayed on their clothing or bags, like a monogram or a school
logo.

At first, her students joked that the assignment was a little
"creepy," Klonick tells Scott Simon in an interview with NPR's
Weekend Edition. But her goal wasn't for them to use or share that
information.

Instead, she wanted them to understand the gap between our perception
of how much privacy we think we have in public spaces -- and the
reality. And, as she puts it, "to show them how thin our privacy
constructions are in the modern day."

Her students, who scattered across the country for break, started
writing to her in astonishment. Some of the most outspoken skeptics
of privacy protections in her class -- the ones who once suggested
that they didn't need privacy because they had nothing to hide -- were
stunned at how quickly they'd found out details of the lives of
strangers who happened to cross their paths.

"It's really quite easy," Klonick says. "Which is part of ... the
scary, kind of, learning tool about this exercise."

One student found the name of a man on a plane after hearing him
arrange his pickup from the airport. Another pinned down the identity
of a stranger on a train by putting together the name of the college
on his shirt with a first name overheard in conversation.

Then there was Lehman.

"I was shocked because I wasn't even trying," Lehman says. "It didn't
seem like anyone was paying attention, but he divulged so much
personal information."

That's not out of the ordinary, according to Klonick. "People think
they are private because they're obscure, because they're one of
many."

Whether you're in a cheering stadium or a packed commuter train, it's
easy to assume that no one is paying attention to you. And before
smartphones, even if someone overheard your conversation, they'd
usually have a hard time piecing together whatever information they
gathered. The level of effort required to get a complete picture of
your identity would, effectively, serve as a deterrent and a privacy
protection.

Not anymore. With Google at our fingertips, it's increasingly easy to
learn a lot about a stranger, even with just a few details.

Klonick says the assignment "shows us at the very least that lot of
the older mechanisms we used to have to protect privacy are no longer
particularly robust in the Internet age, obscurity being one of
them."

She's quick to point out that most people aren't going to Google the
person in line next to them at the grocery store. But they could. And
that's what she hoped her students would take away from the
assignment.

"What I was really trying to teach them is that we have very few laws
that do this type of protection -- and we might not even want them --
but that there have to be some type of protections for privacy,"
Klonick says. So whether it's new laws or something as simple as more
entrenched norms around respecting privacy, "we have to be really
conscious of those and do a little more education on some of those
things if we want to create future protections, either in law or just
in society in general."

The lesson was not lost on Lehman. She says she's been thinking more
about the evolving landscape of privacy law -- and looking forward to
meeting with her class again this week. She's curious about what her
classmates learned, especially the ones who were most casual about
their own privacy.

As for her own expectation of privacy, she's already more conscious
of what she reveals inadvertently, even when she's just chatting with
her sister.

She's realized that a few words about something as innocuous as her
dogs, which she likes to feature on Instagram, could be enough for a
stranger to identify either one of them. And that, she says, is at
least a little unsettling.

Ed McNulty edited this story for broadcast.

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