What Price Privacy?
Photo owned by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (cc)
Privacy is the last bastion of preserving our identity online. Would you be willing to hand over some of the control of that privacy in return for free broadband? Mark Evans poses the question.
The Consumerist this week reports that Charter Communications, a broadband provider in the US, is offering users an ‘enhanced’ browsing experience where ads are targeted to users following analysis of their online habits. The move screams ‘1984′, but we’re already treading that path, aren’t we? After all, our search experiences are profiled every time we use a search engine. A big, fat profile exists on each and every one of us across search engines and social networks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the wrong hands, it could be.
So would you hand over a dossier of your browsing habits for free broadband, or perhaps in Ireland, for decent broadband to begin with? Do you mind the marketeers looking over your shoulder and sending contextual ads? Consensual online stalking, if you would. I suppose the real question is, how do rate the risk the that your browsing data distributed across different data depots on the web, will get connected up into a mesh that profiles you?
Security at these knowledge bases needs to be top-notch. Look back to Charter, for example. Browsers can opt out of it’s ‘enhanced’ service only by submitting their details using an unencrypted form. Alarms bells should be ringing by now. To protect their privacy, users must download an cookie every time they exit their browser or purge their cache. Arghhhh.
The cynics says that we give away breadcrumbs on our identity each and every day. Those broadcast messages in Twitter and Facebook’s status updates tell the world that we’re going down the shop for a pint of milk and the National Enquirer. We trust the service provider to keep certain parts of our profile secret and others public. What happens then when that trust is broken? Or when the provider uses lax security? Sure we could enact legal action, but hasn’t the horse already bolted?