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The price of privacy on the ‘Net
Monday, 15 September 2008 — by Wayne Smallman
Google recently announced that they intend anonymizing the IP addresses they store on their servers after nine months. For privacy advocates, this will no doubt be seen as a triumph. For the vast majority of people out there, they just couldn’t care less…
“Today, we’re announcing a new logs retention policy: we’ll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.”
The main problem is, over time, limiting the amount of data Google et al can retain about their users will seriously impact on the kind of next generation applications they’re developing which will rely heavily on historical data — the very same data they’re getting rid of to sooth and placate privacy advocates.
I call this Google’s information paradox:
“The very fact that Google are even talking about keeping our personal search data longer than eighteen months demonstrates their thinking. If you want personal search to work, then the likes of thee & me need to share more personal information with the search engines…
There’s no way around with this particular search information paradox, one not solved by any purely observation routines and algorithms that Google et al might have in place.”
No matter how smart software gets, to make any kind of guess about our needs, the software must know what those needs are.
There is a way around this impasse, in the form of a contractual agreement between Google and their users, which the user would agree to, allowing Google to store more personal data for longer periods of time.
However, this is all just a run-around, illustrating the needless legal delicacies that have been contrived to be observed to help preserve people’s privacy.
People’s privacy and their indifference to data retention laws
For the most part, the vast majority of people using Google’s search product neither care nor realize the political struggles going on behind the scenes. Most people are happy that Google’s search works and continues to work.
If you sat them down and told them, they still wouldn’t care. Most people don’t even care about what they’re eating, let alone how their web activities are being monitored and stored.
For the benefit of a select few, who charge around spouting off about privacy violations, Google are having to jump through one legal hoop after another.
Yes, I think privacy is very important, but we need to be clear about just how we go about managing our privacy and just how the balance of privacy and usability is to be preserved. Right now, the scales are slipping away in the direction of privacy at the expense of a new breed of applications that would most likely need the very data these new regulations are obfuscating and / or destroying.
Quite surprisingly, Google have gone as close as I suspect they dare to being critical without actually being all that critical:
“Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.”
So which do you prefer — more privacy or more unsolicited emails and fraudulent attacks?
A better solution would be an opt-in button, which would at least bring the issue to the attentions of the vast majority who know nothing about what data & information Google retain concerning them, or the laws governing those stores of data.
Right now, the privacy advocates are shifting the legal landscape shift under the feet of the average web user without them even knowing why. That for me is the worst possible kind of solution — the kind of legal unilateralism that looks more like Big Brother than the privacy “problem” they’re trying to fix…
Recommended reading
- Another step to protect user privacy
- Google’s search information paradox
- Internet access as a basic human right
- Information is a weapon
- Internet anonymity
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I’m really wondering how much data Google can bind together and use against us…. What is their limit?