Imagine that a stranger is following you around all day.
That is what Google Inc. and its chief rivals in Internet search, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc., preoccupy themselves with 24/7 – the collection of data about you based on your Web browsing history.
Google’s stated mission is to learn and make available to seven billion of us all the information in the world. To think it has invested tens of billions of dollars to do that without expectation of a profit defies common sense.
No, the business model of Google and its peers is to use the data they collect from monitoring your Web browsing toenable advertisers to “target” you with their online sales pitches. Inevitably that practice risks privacy invasion.
That issue most powerfully manifested itself earlier this month when a Canadian Internet user who remains nameless was found by Canada’s privacy commissioner to have had his privacy invaded in violation of Canadian law.
That individual, in searching for information about the sleep disorder known as sleep apnea, soon found that he was being “followed” by sleep-apnea-related ads everywhere he traveled on the Web. He construed this as an invasion of his privacy, and is one of the few people to have lodged a complaint about this practice with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
The incoming head of that office, Chantal Bernier, determined the complaint to be valid. “It is inappropriate for this type of information to be used in online behavioural advertising,” Bernier said in a Jan. 15 statement. “Organizations such as Google must ensure privacy rights are respected.”
Google famously was co-founded with a credo of “Don’t be evil.” It already has an elaborate policy on privacy that forbids the online display of advertisements based on religion, race, sexual orientation and, yes, health.
But self-policing has failed time and again, in financial services, in maintaining safe workplaces, in food safety, in proper railway management, and, for that matter, policing itself in racial profiling and misuse of Tasers.
Google acknowledges that its own self-policing routinely fails, that advertisers often breach its privacy policy.
In response to Bernier’s finding, Google has pledged to “upgrade” its monitoring of advertisements to determine their propriety – a practice, by the way, that traditional media outlets have employed for a century.
That Google should act to “upgrade” – which is to say, fix – its poorly enforced privacy standards only in reaction to headlines over the stalking of a sleep-apnea sufferer says all you need to know about how seriously Google has been taking privacy.
Google pledges to have its “upgrade” done by June, apparently the best that this $50-billion (revenues) enterprise that ate the Internet can manage by way of alacrity. It seems that no one regards this sloth as an issue. Bernier herself has commended Google on its prompt response.
Then again, the “behavioural advertising” cited by Bernier is not, in fact, illegal under Canadian law – the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, by name. Privacy law is maddeningly vague for Canadians, data collectors and advertisers alike. It forbids the targeting of Canadians based on “sensitive personal information.”
Well, what is that? Is it one’s extremist libertarian or communist political views, is that where we draw the line? Or my sciatica attack last summer, and the various EMS and hospital services provided for it? A Canadian’s belief that childless people are discriminated against? One’s views on capital punishment, genetically modified foods, appropriate sexual behaviour, and that Jennifer Lawrence rather than Amy Adams should have received a best-actress Oscar nod for American Hustle?
Google, as it happens, is poised to become still more intrusive, having just lavished $3.2 billion (U.S.) on a tiny outfit called Nest. That firm has invented a popular line of home thermostat and smoke-alarm devices.
Not long from now, electronic devices of all descriptions – the computers in your car, your kitchen appliances, your smartphones, your CD and DVD players – will “talk” to each other.
The endgame here is that your Android smartphone – Google’s Android runs the majority of the world’s smartphones – will eventually be collecting data not only in the form of information, such as emails and Web-page views, but data about your machines and what you ask them to do.
In time, you will be able to use your smartphone to remotely adjust that Nest thermostat. To instruct your TV to record a Lincoln Center performance you just learned of moments ago from a concert-listing app on your smartphone. In this age of telemedicine, you’ll be able to set off an alarm reminding your dad to take his meds. The data that search firms now collect – and Google already has pictures of your home and place of employment taken from street level and outer space – will ramp up to even more exhaustive levels.
Yet, here’s the nub of the matter. Very few of us seem to care that our lives are becoming even more of an open book, to be commercially exploited.
The big takeaway from the Edward Snowden revelations about global spying – Canada snooping on Brazil, and America’s National Security Administration (NSA) spying on, well, everybody – is a scandal of interest to a few journalists and practically no one else. It seems that post 9/11, we expect and perhaps hope to be monitored, for our collective safety.
Merchants have sought to know their customers better since a grocer regrettably had to turn away Adam for lack of the pomegranates he sought. So we’ve become sanguine about our merchants’ desire to know more about us. How else to explain why our sleep-apnea friend’s complaint has not resonated with the general public?
We do have a decision to make, a choice of just two options. We can demand that Internet search services get serious about self-policing. Or we can ask the state to determine with more precision what data can be collected and sold, and which cannot.
The first option is preferable, despite the sorry record of self-policing. Google and its rivals are most readily able to manipulate the data they’ve collected on us in a way that is not harmful to our interests.
For the state to do so opens the door to abuse. Who knows, a premier or governor might use it to close a bridge out of partisan revenge. At the very least, taxpayers would prefer not to finance a new bureaucracy to climb the steep learning curve on how to administer the greatest amassing of information in history.
Yes, Big Brother is watching. Turns out Big Brother is not just the state, as George Orwell predicted, but business too, anoutcome unforeseen by the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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