Privacy online is like no other privacy. That is not because the Web is a wild west full of sinister people bent on breaking into your digital lives (though, of course, some such criminals indeed roam the cyberspace). Rather, privacy on the web is a category of its own because of the peculiarity of the Web as a communications medium.
That peculiarity has two main features. One is the Web as the ultimate storage medium. The other is the Web as a medium that has given rise to a new breed of highly diverse service providers whom we entrust with vast amounts of information about ourselves. Think of Google, Yahoo, or Facebook.
The Ultimate Medium?
One of the business domains that must have been affected by the rise of the Web is that of private detectives. Say a private detective is hired to investigate the murder of a school teacher. The first order of business for the detective would be to collect as much information about the departed teacher as possible.
Most of that information would be available in the public domain. But they would be scattered across multiple mediums: school public records, local newspapers, public police records, and so on.
Therefore, the private detective would be essentially hired because he or she (mostly he) can do two things: he can seek and get (mostly) publicly available information efficiently, and he can garner, and hopefully make sense of, information from different mediums, be they text, picture, video, or other.
Now, Google can do those same tasks, free of charge and often faster.
The reason for this is that the Web offers Google a unified medium that can host all kinds of content (text, sound, video, pictures, etc.) using almost the same standards.
Thus Google, our modern-day detective, can unleash its "crawlers" (or search algorithms) to mine and index those forms of content.
That, of course, was not the case in the pre-Web eras. Back then there was paper for text, 35-mm films for motion pictures and magnetic tape for sound, to speak of the 1960s for example.
For someone to track the information about a single person across these mediums would be both laborious and costly. These difficulties curbed the over-curious, and was a natural guarantee of privacy to the unwitting.
With the bit as the universal storage medium, it's a different story. As the Web grew in popularity, the information that used to inhabit a scatter of mediums now found their way to the new unified, all-accommodating medium.
Whether video, sound, photos, text, or any mixture of those, digitizing content (storing it in the digital format of digits, zeros and ones) became possible, and increasingly feasible.
How does this affect privacy? As the Web became the ultimate storage medium, the traditional barriers that separated the different mediums now collapsed.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, what used to be the hilly landscape of different information mediums holding different bits of information is now a level playground all but inviting to Google's (and other search engines') eager crawlers.
Following the Information Trail
And by ensuring those customers visit the websites often, the latter could figure out a way to make money, for example from advertising.
That turned out to be a compelling offering to most of us. Using MSN's "net passport" or a Yahoo or a
Google account, one can effortlessly ease from e-mail, to instant messaging, to photo-sharing, to searching, all without having to enter a different username and password.
That is convenient, not only to users, but also to those service providers who can track, legitimately, our browsing patterns, search history, and content and shopping preferences. And that's not all. Over the years, major companies have fiercely competed to capture the most information about
users by acquiring smaller companies that own information about users.
For example, Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and Google grabbed DoubleClick in 2007. Both Inktomi and DoubleClick specialize in serving Web ads tailored to particular web browsing patterns, which in turn are associated with specific IPs, or the address of each computer on the Web.
Not surprisingly, alarm over how much the likes of Google knew about their users grew.
To allay some of the fears, Google in early November launched Google Dashboard, which is "designed to be simple and useful [by summarizing] data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings," the official announcement said.
Google is the first to offer such a service. For that it deserves credit. Still, the new service fails to
address the main privacy-related concerns. As many have noted, Google stayed coy on its search data retention policy.
Google keeps logs of who does search on what -- by associating keywords with IPs -- for nine months. Many (including EU privacy regulators) find this too long a period.
Also on Dashboard, Google does not tell you what information it has discovered or deduced about you based on your browsing and search patterns. It just reminds you of the information you've intentionally shared about yourself. That is good, but insufficient.
A better Dashboard would afford users to determine what Google knows about them. This would include how long Google keeps the information about the user, what this information is, what Google's interpretation of this information is, and whether or not Google (or Yahoo or Facebook) can store information about the user to begin with.
Storing information about a user is not always a bad thing, though. Part of what makes Google an effective search engine is that it's better than its rivals at tailoring its results to each (singed-in) user according to his/her search history.
So if you are a zoologist and you search the keywords "whale oil," you are unlikely to see at the top of the results page links to restaurants and East Asian resorts.
And this points to a central aspect of the dilemma of privacy on the Web: oftentimes most people are willing to trade some of their privacy for convenience. Let Google's software "read" my e-mails and serve ads based on their content if in turn I will get a reliable e-mail service with vast storage capacity.
Let Yahoo collect information about me if in turn I will move across many services with no "sign in" prompts. More convenience, even if the cost is less privacy, appears to be the bargain most of us indifferently or unwittingly accept.
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