whatever happened to plain ol’ chasing money?
We’re all agreed that the bigger a company gets the more evil it gets, but why is this? The two highest-profile (to me) and most recent are Facebook and Google. Remember when Google just wanted to show you ads on its search engine related to what you physically typed into it? Those were the good times. Now it wants to read your email (GMail), control your computer (GoogleOS), know what you’re doing when you’re not using Google products (GCal), be your mate (Buzz – seriously, wtf), know exactly what you’re looking at online (Chrome, Google DNS), look at all your pictures (Picasa), give your leg a tumour (Android) and even attach its phoneline to your house. I get justifying this to shareholders – “Imagine if we could read everyone’s email – we could put ads right there in people’s inbox!”, “Imagine if we powered everyone’s computer – we could show ads on their desktop/screensaver/bootscreen based on their internet usage”, and everyone gets a nice, shiny free product to play with.
But are these products really free? I mean, sure, you don’t put your credit card details into these things and there’s not a person sat monitoring everything you do and laughing when you put on some goat porn, but if you’re using Google DNS or Chrome then you can bet they have a record of someone at an IP you used doing it. And if you’re logged in to a Google product as well, you know all it takes is matching those IPs together and we’ve got a name and a face. So now, every time you turn on your Googleputer, there’s no reason NOT to show you a Google Ad for the latest installment of unmissable goat porn on your Google Desktop – you WATCHED it, so you must want to watch more! It stands to reason that when I have an email about Viagara in my inbox, I want to see ads for it too.
To me, that doesn’t make these products free. Sure, I use GMail, but only because I can hook it up to my mail client and forego the ads, I use the search because it’s fast and integrated with almost everything and I use GCal for work, but think about the type of data you’re giving companies access to before you actually use these “free” services. If you don’t know what DNS is, but you know Google’s is pretty fast – find out what DNS is before you tell a company EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT, NO EXCEPTIONS. If you like the sound of a free operating system, think about what it means to give a company access to ANYTHING you do on your computer. I’m not saying this is the case, but if you don’t want to pay for an OS; there are plenty of amazing, free ones around.
Google has quickly learned from twitter that knowing about your users as in where they are or what their name is, or what someone said in an email isn’t worth nearly as much as knowing every little thing about our lives. Where you’re going to eat, what you ate when you got there, what you’re reading, what you recommend, what movies you like, where you work, what you do whilst you’re at work, all of that makes anything you’ve got with a screen and a Google product on the potential to be a tiny billboard for any type of thing that can be programmatically deemed applicable to you – and it’s not independently moderated – if someone finds out you like the sound of an iPad, you aren’t going to be getting legit ads on where to get one, you’re going to be getting shitty “GET A FREE IPAD IF YOU JUST GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS AND MAIL US YOUR FIRST CHILD” ads. You’ve seen Google text ads, right? You might even use a plugin in your web browser to block them, so why open yourself up to have them put all over your life?!
It’s hard to blame Google for this, and they’re not the only ones. I mentioned Facebook; they’re getting just as bad, and they’ll probably end up worse, and this is why. You willingly tell Facebook EVERYTHING. Date of birth, who you’re related to, stuff you like, your employment history, political views, music taste, everything. You then proceed to give it up-to-the-minute information on all the stuff that’s catching your attention now. You’re a fickle idiot, and so was I until this all occurred to me. What’s potentially worse about Facebook is that you’re telling all of this stuff to them, giving them all your secrets, and they’re giving this data to anyone who knows a web developer. When you install an application, I bet you don’t read what they get access to – those little cancerous quizzes have access to “your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that [it] requires to work”. Do you really like quizzes enough to tell Johnny Nobody all that stuff about you? I don’t.
So, what’s the point in this? Mark Zuckerberg says that “privacy is no longer a social norm“, and I agree. Everything that you can write down about yourself can be leveraged to try and sell you something. Fair enough, it could be something that you might want, but I want that ball to always stay in my court. If I want to buy something, I’ll look for it. Eric Schmidt says that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“. This is utter bullshit. You’re entitled to have secrets and you should have secrets. Maybe don’t tweet about them, or post them on your Facebook wall, but they’re not secrets if you’re doing that. What Mr. Schmidt is saying there is “if you have a secret and you use one of my company’s products, I’m going to use that secret to get some scammer to try and sell you shit”.
Now, I’m not against avertising. It can be pretty useful. However, Google used to just be a box to search stuff in. Then it was a box to search stuff in with ads on it, then it was an online equivalent of everything you used to do on your desktop computer. Now it’s all that stuff from before, plus it’s got its own backup of the internet, and soon it’ll have phonelines. It’s always changing the game, and it keeps all that stuff it had from before. No matter how they decide to change the game up, they’re always going to know everything you’ve ever told them, whether you know they did or not. Same with Facebook. So, think about what you’re telling websites about yourself and who might end up knowing that stuff and, if in doubt, walk outside with your eyes closed and tell the first person you bump into what you were going to tell that website – if you’re comfortable with them knowing it then you’re OK!
James
Not only all that but you actually don’t have a choice. Everyone else puts your information on the internet for you – tagging you in photos, sending you invitations to the next big social network, involving you in their entire family tree…
I agree – it’s a tenuous situation, but without all this liberal information sloshing around, would the internet be what it is today? Facebook, despite it’s downfalls, is an immensely successful product loved by millions, and in essence, all it is is a platform to share your innermost secrets. Gmail is a popular e-mail client because it was the first of the popular 3 e-mails to give away the biggest storage, and then it integrated everything else with everything else it had. Personally I find it useful to be able to look at my calendar and mail on my phone, PC, anywhere etc. and it’s all integrated really well. I don’t know many other e-mail/calendar/notes/documents/feed reader/whatever combination that does that, and of course to a certain extend you’ve got to share a lot of information about yourself.
At the end of the day, it comes down to whether we can trust these big companies with our information. And if we can, will then will they spit in our faces and break our trust anyway? The whole recent privacy issue with Buzz didn’t seem to stop people using Google’s products did it…
I’m seeing this topic discussed more and more, to the point of even speculating some kind of dystopian future run by Google… But that’s all it is at the moment – speculation. We can’t read the future, so perhaps these companies need to do more to assure us that they’re not going to do anything bad. Facebook have obviously taken steps to attempt that, but people either don’t care (or are unaware), or they trust companies – and I don’t think many people really took notice. So what can they do to earn our trust?
Jasper Tandy
James! Awesome comment, yet again.
Your first point about other people putting all your details online for you is one that opens a whole other can of worms that I didn’t want to go into, but you’re absolutely right. The only way to be properly safe from it is to sign up to Facebook but not make any firends on there!!
One thing I guess isn’t clear in my post is that I’m totally not against the web as a social tool. I probably wouldn’t have as much work as I do if so many people weren’t obsessed with telling every little thing about themselves to everyone. I used Twitter and Facebook very regularly for a relatively long time (and still flickr and last.fm because of what they give to me in return) and only really left because the positives I was getting from them were outweighed by the negatives, and that includes the loss of privacy. To be honest, if it wouldn’t be a mountain of work to sort out, I would move from GMail, but I have like 2.5GB on there, and no clue about how to extract all that! In that aspect, what I’m really troubled by is a corporate-owned cloud. So many companies use Google products to power their calendars, email, documents, whatever, without realising that they’re making Google way more money than they’re saving themselves! And if Google does give way to this dystopian Google Future™ that everyone’s so scared of, that could mean a lot of trouble for a lot of (granted smaller) companies.
To be honest, you’re right, all it boils down to is whether companies can be trusted with all this information long term. As much as they appear to be being responsible now (with Google edging tellingly close to evil), there’s no guarantee that they will be forever, and that’s enough for me to start being pragmatic and generating an exit strategy!
You’ve also illustrated another extremely important point; people don’t care about what happens with this information. It doesn’t hurt them short term. But, in my opinion, people should care and, by the time they realise why, it might already be too late! It never hurt anyone to exercise a bit of caution.
Russell
You have a limited choice. You can prevent people from tagging you in photos, you can remove tags, you can remove yourself from events or just plain refuse/ignore invitations. And whilst, seemingly, your privacy is in your own hands, the worrying thing is not that people don’t seem to know this, but that they don’t seem to care – and more importantly that even then, at the end of the day, it’s personal control only on a superficial level.
Why is that a problem? Well I suppose in a perfect world it isn’t, if as you say all that matters is that people enjoy the internet and can share their innermost secrets then that is the platform given to them by Facebook, Google et al, and we should be happy that there is something to allow us to do it to the extent we can. Well it is a problem, and it’s because we have no control over our own data.
One great piece of legislation in this country is the Data Protection Act, and we can ultimately have data held on us deleted if we desire. This is not the case with sites like Facebook and Google. They remember everything. Every search you’ve made, every photo you’ve been tagged in, everything. Every time you search on Google, you are reducing your potential results, based on past searching and browsing history. Again – why is this a problem? Well it was all well and good when you were getting unbiased results from the huge amount of information on the internet, however now you are getting links based on how much money Google can make.
Why go to a library only to be told yes, you can read a particular book, but because you only read chapters 1-10 last time you can only look at those this time, oh and by the way – because you sent that email to your friend remarking how awesome it was to see them at Starbucks last night (because all GMail users are Starbucks users lets face it*) on every page there will be an advert to push you to buy a Starbucks coffee machine.
And the more worrying fact is whether we are headed towards a Google dystopic future or not – or Googlopia – there are many reasons to be worried about the direction that Google especially is headed. You do not construct a network that copies and carries 10% (and rising) of the worlds internet traffic, based on your own proprietary routing protocols without certain motives. You do not, as a “search provider”, offer to build FOTH (Fibre Optic to The Home) without certain motives. You do not construct utility after utility for free without certain motives. How long before targeted adverts – based on your browsing history – hit street view? Not long. You do not blacklist journalists from finding out personal information – FROM YOUR OWN SEARCH ENGINE – and yet not provide this facility to your customers, without ulterior motives. Google exists especially to feed it’s own advertising revenue, at any cost. And that cost is, sadly, to the Internet’s expense.
If the words of Eric Schmidt are anything to go by – that ‘only miscreants worry about net privacy’ – we are headed for the world of 1984, or more factually and less dystopicly literate: North Korea. What can they do to earn our trust? I don’t know about you, but in my case: nothing.