P2P's privacy problem

This is not the first news about P2P's privacy risks, just the latest: A lot of people are inadvertently sharing their email address books on the file-sharing networks. If you have music fans at your house who are using P2P services like Kazaa, LimeWire, etc., this is one more way your family could be experiencing an online privacy breach. How? After it's downloaded, P2P software usually creates a shared media folder. File-sharers need to make sure all that's in there is what they *intend* to share - e.g., music files. Studies have shown that a lot more is being shared from family computers, such as emails or financial and medical records. Here's the latest study about spammers harvesting email addresses on P2P networks, as told by the BBC. Here's an earlier, more comprehensive study in 2002 at HP Labs and a 2003 report based on US congressional hearing, "Overexposed: The Threats to Privacy and Security on File-Sharing Networks." See also "File-sharing realities for families."