 David Spark reporting for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I am here at the Security B-Sides Conference in San Francisco. These people in attendance, these security professionals, these tech professionals, all of us enjoy having digital lives. The question is, do they take it for granted? When was the moment you realized online privacy was important? I think when I got my first spam message and I had my own name in it and I thought, gosh, how does this random spammer know who I am and how can I protect my own identity from here on out? I first started using AIM in middle school when people that I didn't know would try to add me and it freaked me out and I decided then that if they could find me there that none of my stuff was ever going to be safe online. I was kind of searching for some personal stuff on the net and then I realized that the advertisement for those stuff started coming in other websites. Then I realized that everything is kind of so open. When I was teaching packet capture and realized, you know what, everyone can look at what's going across in clear text. That was the point where I realized essentially we're sending mail to each other on host cards. Everyone along the path can read what's written on it. As for the content of the mail, I saw that there were a couple of ads coming onto my mailbox. Obviously that means my main provider is reading my mail. The moment that I realized online privacy was important was the moment that my dad found my first blog. I had a blog and I wrote angry things. Parents from my school went to like the school administration and wanted to get me thrown out. My future boss expressed some reservations that I was regularly posting on a regional Gothic mailing list and he wasn't comfortable with someone like me working at his company. The moment I knew is when one of my friends was a victim of a terrible car accident. Her character was brought into question in court based on some live journal posts that she had made. I wanted to save space online, a place where I can experiment with myself and not have other people look back at like 1990 whatever to know about my history. We have to protect our identities online so that we can experiment with ourselves going forward. Private data in any form can be damaging to the individual if the wrong person gets it and if people are clumsy with it then you're screwed.