In a recent article published by the NY Times, the concept of Collective Intelligence was adequately explained. CI is something privacy experts have been warning about for years and now its finally here. “About 100 students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.

The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.”

As a privacy advocate, CI is one of those emerging practices that causes me great concern. In the Identity Theft world, we’ve learned that one of the challenges identity thieves have is that they require a complete profile in order to cause real damage. In order to fully take advantage of someone’s identity, they require many data points about their victim such as SSN, DOB, full name, street address, etc.

Full profiles are harder to get since they typically require hacking into multiple databases to compile a single complete profile. With CI, Identity Theft becomes much easier, hack the aggregator, and youve got access not only to a complete profile about an individual, but you also have a complete set of their interaction history. So if your security question is “high school” or “city of birth” or “pet name”, a CI hacker will have access to that information at their fingertips.

As a consumer, a way to protect yourself from becoming an unwilling participant, is to utilize Privacy 2.0 services to anonymize your interactions on the web and beyond.