After Google CEO Eric said ”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” last Dec, earlier this month, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg made comments that “the age of privacy is over”. These two companies, one is the most famous search engine company which provides various online services including Gmail, Gtalk, Online Storage and etc, while the other is the social networking company, which provides the biggest social platform in the world to help its registered users to keep their personal relations with their families, friends and classmates. Therefore what these two people said could be taken as the announcement that the fading of privacy guarantee has started. Then as one of the general internet users, what can we do to protect our privacy? Can we still have internet privacy? Personally, I feel quite doubtful.
In the real world, people respect privacy and can keep most of their personal information under control. Has ever any postal service company been able to analyze your mail content and insert some ads to your envelop? Never, or else you can sue it. However, in the cyberspace, the situation changed. Privacy invasion becomes hard to define. Anything goes to the web server could be automatically spied. And most of the times, the customized services we receive from internet companies are exchanged by our personal information. Take Amazon as an example, product suggestions based on your last time search will be provided for you every time you get accessed to Amazon. Some people like these features, as Amazon does provide useful suggestions. Some may not, since their personal information is collected and tracked by this company, which might cause their information leaked to the public. But no matter whether you like it or not, there isn’t any option available for you to turn off these functions when you are using Amazon. Then could we say the company is invading our privacy? Perhaps not, as we couldn’t provide a set of criterions to judge whether this is privacy invasion. Take Google as another example, when you use Gmail, Google will insert ads to your email interface based on the analysis of your email content. You may understand Google, since they provide email service for free and they need ads revenue to cover their outcomes. As we are using more Google products, Google becomes more powerful and legally knows larger amount of our personal information. For instance, according to their privacy policies when you use Gtalk, they collect “the size of your contact list and the contacts you communicate with”. When you use Google voice, they record your personal information which includes “calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls”. It seems that the legislative solution – privacy policy – is protecting more about the company, less about the users. Here is an interesting video showing the privacy of Google. We could understand them in one product. But the more you use, the more privacy you lose. It’s like Google using the different parts collected from different products to piece together the whole picture of you. How much private life could we keep? One day, you’ll find everything is under Google’s watch and track, instead of your own control. Worse still, Google is a company whose aim is gaining more profits, though it said “do no evil” and claimed all the information are being read by machines right now instead of people. I am not against these companies. These companies are great, and they are changing our life. However, our private life should not depend on the conscience of the companies.
On one hand, we don’t have clear privacy invasion definitions to protect our internet privacy. On the other hand, huge profits lure companies to sell or do data mining on personal information. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, US internet advertising revenues reached $10.9 billion in the first half of 2009. For companies which are providing online services for free, how could they neglect this ads market? Therefore, collecting more personal information and sending more targeted ads to users is quite important to the companies. If companies like Google and Facebook, choose to 100% guarantee users’ personal information is under their own control, then how could they cover the cost of their online services? So “the age of privacy is over” is just an excuse. Take personal email information as an example. As we know, spam senders will collect email addresses on the web, and then send spam emails such as ads, job openings, to your email accounts. Actually, this is just an email address, I’m not doing something I do not want others know. But I do want my email box could be clean and my private email address is not used by these spam senders to gain money.
Maybe privacy in the internet is only a good wish. Actually any personal information we put online is under the risk of invading. To preserve privacy will never prove to be easy.
{ 4 } Comments
I am on the same side with Jingjing on this issue. Everyone knows how fast internet technology develops these days, and with this trend, privacy violation is also evolving the ways to infringe personal information. In the beginning, the infringement started with a small computer virus which just crashes the hardware or software. After that, the virus grew to malware to steal personal information or to break your computer, and now we can find private information about you from the internet in a few minutes. I also found one video from the YouTube which indicates how much privacy might be infringed in a near future.
“In the real world, people respect privacy and can keep most of their personal information under control.”
Why is this? Is it that information is not published automatically in day to day life? if we add more surveillance and tools that create content will the default be private in day to day life for long?
The video you shared is so funny. With so much power in collecting information and without effective privacy-protecting laws, Google could do more evil rather than “do no evil”.
For the traditional communication methods like mails sent by post office, I think the privacy could still be owned by people. Since if the seal is broken, people will know their privacy is infringed and they could use relevant laws to protect their rights. But as more surveillance and tools are added, people are losing their private life without even noticing this. And there isn’t an effective privacy related legislation to regulate activities such as the phone call monitoring or taking street view pictures for map search. Then the default be private in day to day life will not be for long.