I wonder what my search history looks like...
Posted on August 10, 2006 under Random Rants.
I spend the last two days reading various articles about the latest AOL screw-up. Making the several months of search history of several hundred thousand subscribers available publicy was indeed a big mistake, although arguably a mistake in the first place.
I'm more on the privacy side of the argument, meaning that I do not think any entity should keep records of any kind about me if it is not in whatever I deem to be in my interest. Sadly we live in times where people are more concerned about other things than their privacy, which seems to be very good news for entities that want to know as much as possible about an individual. At this rate our right to privacy will soon be reduced to not being watched when we go to the bathroom.
In reality any tiny speck of information about anyone is the hottest comodity on the Internet, because correlated to another speck of info about somebody else and so on it creates a bigger picture that enables web companies to tailor their content to match your needs and wants. Put in laymens terms any piece of information about you will be dissected in million ways by most of the internet companies to try to sell you something. They are never going to stop gathering that information because they need to sell you something in order to survive. Sadly the Internet is well beyond the hippie phase where it was just a free-for-all collection of information. The economic reality is way more complex and different now.
Since gathering all this information is a given, maybe we can prevent companies that gather it from doing stupis things with it. Wrong. That's never going to happen. First because in 99.99% of the cases it is not sufficiently protected and second because companies are trying to push the envelope and see how much they can get away with.
The case of the lady in Georgia where the search data involuntarily published by AOL allowed for identifying her is unfortunate but it proves a very clear point. Gather enough data about somebody and you can identify a person. What I am equally affraid of is the fact that none of that information is really usable for anybody until it can define a person.
It would seem we are nearing a very unavoidable truth, there is no way to stop it and i can guarantee anybody that any effort to contain the problem is futile. Bottom line is: THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET, probably even less than there is such an expectation in the "real" world. And that's probably also because people seem to be more comfortable divulging personal information to a computer screen than in a social environment, and no MySpace is not a social environment in the traditional sense. Thus the false expectation of privacy the internet creates among it's many users.
I'm more on the privacy side of the argument, meaning that I do not think any entity should keep records of any kind about me if it is not in whatever I deem to be in my interest. Sadly we live in times where people are more concerned about other things than their privacy, which seems to be very good news for entities that want to know as much as possible about an individual. At this rate our right to privacy will soon be reduced to not being watched when we go to the bathroom.
In reality any tiny speck of information about anyone is the hottest comodity on the Internet, because correlated to another speck of info about somebody else and so on it creates a bigger picture that enables web companies to tailor their content to match your needs and wants. Put in laymens terms any piece of information about you will be dissected in million ways by most of the internet companies to try to sell you something. They are never going to stop gathering that information because they need to sell you something in order to survive. Sadly the Internet is well beyond the hippie phase where it was just a free-for-all collection of information. The economic reality is way more complex and different now.
Since gathering all this information is a given, maybe we can prevent companies that gather it from doing stupis things with it. Wrong. That's never going to happen. First because in 99.99% of the cases it is not sufficiently protected and second because companies are trying to push the envelope and see how much they can get away with.
The case of the lady in Georgia where the search data involuntarily published by AOL allowed for identifying her is unfortunate but it proves a very clear point. Gather enough data about somebody and you can identify a person. What I am equally affraid of is the fact that none of that information is really usable for anybody until it can define a person.
It would seem we are nearing a very unavoidable truth, there is no way to stop it and i can guarantee anybody that any effort to contain the problem is futile. Bottom line is: THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET, probably even less than there is such an expectation in the "real" world. And that's probably also because people seem to be more comfortable divulging personal information to a computer screen than in a social environment, and no MySpace is not a social environment in the traditional sense. Thus the false expectation of privacy the internet creates among it's many users.