Commentary
Do You Really Think Online Privacy Exists?
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2010
Americans consider a privacy leak to be people taking personal information without their permission and committing identity theft, but few understand what privacy means when it comes to companies following a person's footprint through the Internet to target ads. Personalized ads provide convenience, but it means companies know everything about consumers, from what search queries they make to the coffee they drink to the books downloaded from Amazon onto their Kindles. The information is indexed, downloaded and cross-referenced.
Goodman and I both adopted the Internet early. So, I asked him, "Do you really believe online privacy can exist in any form?" He said "At one time I was a big believer in the old statement 'On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.' That's no longer true, and the concept erodes a little more every day."
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Today, there's a bit of privacy on the Net, depending on how intelligently you behave online, but it's slowly starting to disappear, Goodman says. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but rather a double-edge sword.
Anonymity leads to online fraud; actually having total transparency on the Internet diminishes the possibility of identity theft and fraud. Goodman says Google now has the ability to identify someone with a dozen photographs because they likely link into other information about you online.
"Privacy is slowing starting to vanish," Goodman admits. "When it comes to political dissidents, people speaking out about government and abusing the Internet for the promise of those tools of democratization, the death of privacy kills that, too."
Corporations with resources still have some level of privacy, but it's not clear how long that will last, Goodman says. Take Wikileaks, for example. The repository provides raw data on government secrets. There's all this data floating around the Internet, from emails in the mid 1990s to Facebook. Hubs across the Internet create copies of the bits and bytes that travel the pipes. The problem has been correlating the data and connecting the dots. Now we can.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.
Great article.
To be honest, I think there has been a tradeoff of privacy for convenience. Forget about what traditional media and the less than 1% of Facebook complainers say, the majority of Americans have made the decision that if they opt in to something and know it will bring them more value and convenience, they'l trade some of their personal information.
Internet is a giant system of pipes connected to reservoirs of data. Some of it is driven by cookies (browser and flash). Some is driven by website beacons that collect landing page semantics linked to cookies. The remainder is sites one belongs to and information collected under site privacy agreements. Included in this subset are financial relationships (online banking, Paypal, game credits, ecommerce transactions).
The piping system is neutral, connecting to sources of data. But third parties are not neutral. Some collect data from multiple sources (your Friends list from social media sites for example). Ours "sell data" to drive advertising.
On top of this are blogs, comment posts (such as this one), tweets, personal websites, photo websites and so on.
Bernard Lee is working on the semantic web that delivers an ontology, semantic categorization, artificial intelligent crawlers and sophisticated translation software (lkanguage, imaging, media, sound).
All these forces will create a means for anyone to follow your identity from online activities.
One should watch the information brokers of today and see how they will leverage this information as a consortium. This includes the likes of Donnelley and AXciom (direct marketing), Experian (credit bureau), Neustar (phone number portability), Healthcare portals (WebMD) and the search engines themselves (Google, Bing, US Govt).
Finally, the Federal Govt through FCC and FBI and NSA deployed many points of access to harvest information, both on the Web and through the Telcos.
Privacy? Don't think so now and definitely not in the future
Imagine: Shared information about a medically dependent spouse or child which costs an insurance company bundles and charges the company for which you work accordingly. Go ahead. Try to prove why you were the first to be laid off. Go ahead. Try to prove why another company does not want to touch you with a 10 foot health pole. Just because your saltine cracker company shared info with your insurance company which was "shared" by the company for which you need to secure employment.
Those of us in the industry don't talk honestly about this topic enough and yet many of the companies we represent or work with provide major pieces of the ecosystem that significantly impact how privacy works. It's good for us to not only think about the issue in terms of online advertising because privacy exists, or fails to exist, through the interactions of all the parts of the Internet collectively. Aside from the very real risks touched on by Paula Lynn, I personally don't worry about it much myself. As far as I know, no one is paying any attention to me so my privacy is nearly absolute, as a practical matter. My credit already sucks so nobody is trying to run any identity scams on me; I get zero flirts on three different dating sites, and the local FBI agent never asks me if I have any anti American sentiments, even when I cuss him out when we are playing tennis together. I guess you only have to worry about privacy when you have an interesting life.
Sensible people have long been driven mad by the extremes of the privacy discussion. There is value in being known -- even to advertisers! Anonymity or "you have no privacy so get over it" is a false choice. The focus needs to be on access, control and authentication. Companies that offer those services to customers will have leg up now and for a long time.
Kudos. I appreciate that you highlight that most people view privacy leak as identity theft. When a visitors web site specific information is stolen or leaked that is clearly identity theft.
Detecting malicious software is a key component of detecting attempts at identity theft online. Content providers need to increase their protection efforts. There is software that performs this step, which some of the content providers use. (Disclosure: that is what my firm does.)
When the behavioral targeting applications of advertisers and other content providers capture visitors' web site specific information and behaviors, they carry a heavy responsibility for protecting that information. When Tacoda, Netflix, Aardvark (just purchased by Google), and other web applications become hyper-aware of our preferences and private information, they must take great steps to protect that. Every breech gives more ammunition to people who want to ban the data capture and use. Content providers, and those in the online advertising ecosystem, should step forward to only accept information that the visitor opts in to share. They need to make their use, and sharing, of the visitor information easier and more available for visitors to see.
Sylvie Chen brings up some good points as do others here. As a marketing guy, sure, I want as much info as I can gather. But as an individual I want control over my information. I'm willing to give some info to get some benefit.
The company I'm working with is creating an online privacy tool that truly keeps your info private if you want - giving you control.
Take a look if you want, it's in beta and is free at www.getCocoon.com if you'd like to try it out.
Thanks for the quality post and comments from folks.
Sorry Bruce. I can't believe a thing you say about yourself unless you want companies to think that so you are left out of there charade. You are incredibly smart( not to mention the other whoey) and the FBI would want you to work for them if they were smart.
I spelled their as there. Major "pho pa" ! ;)
Personal information is basically property with value for whomever holds it, so I think privacy is impossible.