I attended a forum three weeks ago on civil liberties and racial profiling. At the end, someone made the statement that racial profiling will probably decrease as personal profiling increases, causing an entirely new and very scary set of problems. I’d like to ask my fellow students if this bothers any of them.

I love my e-mail, my Palm Pilot, my laptop, and other electronic toys I own, but I resent the fact that my entire identity is now online for the world to see, shielded by a single user ID and password. My credit card information, my EZ-Pass information, my student loan information, all my RPI grades, all my students’ grades, and probably much more that I’m forgetting is all available to anyone who happens to go to a particular website and can guess my userid and password.

Even if I don’t personally choose to use these accounts, they still exist! Before it was assumed that everyone had e-mail, there were actual paper trails to follow when things went wrong. What do we have now? If someone happens to get ahold of your eight-digit password, how could you prove it was not you who did something online? How could you reverse it? Does this bother anyone?

Donna Dietz