Perhaps you’ve been watching what the news media have dubbed “the privacy war”. Since rolling out its new “like” buttons and “instant personalization” feature, Facebook has become the leading scapegoat in the conflict between privacy and personalization.
A lot of people think that the privacy war is simply about whether a random person who stumbles across your Facebook profile will be able to see pictures of you or figure out where you work. While that is a concern, it’s just scratching the surface of the privacy issue.
To clarify: privacy in the context of the Internet is the free ability of a user to remain largely anonymous, or to control exactly what information others can obtain about him. Personalization is the idea that the more a website or service knows about you, the more they can present information to you that you’re likely to want.
In its infancy, the Internet was a very private place, where users could only be traced by IP address, a very rough metric of physical location. As services like Google, Facebook, and others have become pervasive, it’s become much easier for the information giants to track users’ browsing habits.
When you visit any website, you’re downloading a bunch of code, images, and text. Any of these items can be sent to you directly from the site you’re visiting, or they can be included from another website, and in this case, the other website can track you. Moreover, if you happen to be logged into the second website, they can not only track your IP address, but link the hit to your personal account.
An example: I go to CBS.com and watch a video. I happen to still be logged into Facebook. Since CBS has a Facebook “like” button on every page (which is loaded from Facebook’s servers), my visit to the CBS video counts as a hit to Facebook. And since I’m still logged in, Facebook can, in principle, log the fact that I personally, my account, viewed that particular CBS video. Now Facebook can use this information to give me targeted ads for becoming a CSI – or whatever the video I watched was about.
Now you begin to understand why some people are so paranoid about privacy. The Internet giants currently have a huge reach on the web: every Google map, Google calendar widget, Google Buzz widget, Google javascript library, YouTube video, Facebook “like” button, Facebook “friends” box, etc. that’s embedded on any web page could potentially associate your visit to that page with your Google, Facebook, YouTube, or other accounts.
Ask yourself if you’re comfortable with that. Even if you have nothing to hide, it’s a heck of a lot of information for a single entity to know about you. And that’s the core issue behind the privacy war.
The information about exactly what data these companies collect, and exactly what they do with it, isn’t readily available. But there are hints.
From Facebook’s privacy policy:
Information we receive from third parties:
Facebook Platform. We do not own or operate the applications or websites that you use through Facebook Platform (such as games and utilities). Whenever you connect with a Platform application or website, we will receive information from them, including information about actions you take. In some cases, in order to personalize the process of connecting, we may receive a limited amount of information even before you connect with the application or website.
Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:
- We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
- We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.
and from Google’s privacy policy:
Information we collect and how we use it
…
Affiliated Google Services on other sites – We offer some of our services on or through other web sites. Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to Google in order to deliver the service. We process such information under this Privacy Policy. The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.
These statements are not specific, but they basically say that, in order to personalize your experience, the services may receive and store unspecified kinds and amounts of information from third party sites and services.
Google’s and Facebook’s primary source of revenue is advertising. Every banner ad served by Google and Facebook is a potential sales opportunity for the advertiser, and the giants want to maximize the actual sales (so they can increase profit). The most reliable way to maximize actual sales is by targeting ads. So it’s in the giant’s interests to store as much information about you as possible.
Please don’t misunderstand – I’m not just raging against Facebook and Google here. I actually think that such companies provide perform an immensely useful service for their users. But at the same time, it’s a bit scary. The more information you have about someone, the more power you have over them (ask any intelligence agent).
So – what’s the answer to privacy? I would like to see companies like Facebook and Google be very clear about what information they collect, and what they do with that information. Then users could make a judgement as to whether they are comfortable with that. Of course, this probably won’t happen anytime soon, because the minute one giant gives out this information, they’re giving up an edge on their competition.
In the meantime, you can try to safeguard your privacy on the Internet in the following ways:
- Take some time to peruse, understand, and adjust your privacy settings on your Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other accounts.
- When you need to use on of these services, do so briefly, and remember to log out when you’re done.
- Clear your cookies often – this will effectively log you out of any sites you’ve signed into.
- If you like to stay on one service for an extended period of time (like leaving your Facebook open all day at work), leave it open in one web browser program (Google Chrome, for instance), and do your web browsing with another program (Mozilla Firefox, for instance). Your login will not carry over from one browser to the other.
