Shine a little light on me

This week’s readings lean toward the paranoid, no? Although the technology mentioned in the article has changed and many of the companies they marked as leaders in content delivery have been usurped; the basic claims have not changed. Advances in content delivery have a consequence: anonymity is lost.

The concept is simple: Content on demand services are at their heart server/terminal relationships. This means that the user doesn’t have any content, just a terminal with network access that has the ability to display content from a remote server. Anytime you are connecting to a server, you are leaving records of what you requested. Anytime you are leaving electronic records, companies are analyzing them and developing profiles.

What’s different now, as opposed to 20 or 30 years ago when data mining techniques went into the mainstream, is that instead of just general demographic mapping based on gender, location, income, etc; one-to-one data mapping can be done based on the logs of your online activity.

Examples of this include Amazon’s “You Might Also Like”, Netflix’s “Suggestions for you” or Facebook ads. By using the choices and preferences of their massive user base, they are better able to target products and services to their users resulting in more targeted (and in theory more effective) ads.

The convergence of technologies though, that we are adjusting to. We sort of expect our privacy to be invaded online and when we subscribe to magazines and when we register to win free windows at the mall. But television was always ours, it was always private and it was always our business if we watched nothing but the Jersey Shore or the Maury Povich show.

However scary these articles (TV That Watches You and Tapping into TiVo) make our collective privacy invasion seem, both of the articles come woefully short of predicting anything like the profiling carnival we have now.

When these articles were written, content was still defined by its medium – radio was transmitted over fm and am bands, television via cable or television bands, books as, well, books, movies and music by physical media such as CDs and DVDs. But that has changed – ohh boy has that changed. Starting with music and podcasts, everything has been redefined as digital data and nothing more. Anymore, the only reason we call things television shows or movies is for traditions sake.

With AppleTV, GoogleTV, Windows Media Center and video game consoles that are networkable, the internet (and all digital content) is now available on our primary consumption device – the television. Never before have so many mediums been so immediately traceable through one mechanism. As almost everything we do moves online, therefore all our consumer behavior becomes analyzable and comparable.

SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

It means that people are starting to get worried about who is collecting what information. Just recently, the Federal Trade Commission began floating the idea of creating a “Do Not Track” list which would limit the ability of online marketers to track all the sites we visit online. But the issue is greater than just a do not track list. The ability to actively monitor all data, regardless of type is at best a boon to marketers and at worst an invasion of privacy only heard of in 1984 and Google Street View (cheap joke).  There is no doubt that marketing and advertising has become incredible specific and more effective than ever. Amazon always knows what I want, Netflix suggestions are very, very good and the ability for Google and Bing to match searches to ads is often amazing.

But at what cost? Who actually knows what about who? After decades of operating in a wild-west like internet, we are slowly coming to a realization that the internet is a business and is run by people who are trying to make money. Servers and fiber are tangible assets that cost loads of money to install and run, while designers, content producers are real people who spend real time to make real products. Perhaps the economy is changing and many of the functions are being done by people willing to work for less than in previous economies, but these costs are real and business expectations haven’t changed quick enough to effectively change these operating costs.

In terms of protecting privacy, Europe is ahead of the United States – but at the cost of more government monitoring and restriction of online speech (See Italy vs. YouTube). As I see it though, it’s not that we are terribly worried about the information being out there, we’ve been giving away information freely since the first credit cards. It’s that for the first time we are starting to understand just how massive these data collection efforts are and that our actions online do have real world implications and consequences.

I have no idea if internet companies are inherently good or bad, but in the end it doesn’t matter. What I do know is that they have stockpiles of information on my browsing and purchasing habits. They know what I like to read, what I seem to agree with politically, what I buy for myself (and probably what I buy for others) and a host of other things I probably can’t even imagine. What has changed is that, for some reason, I and a lot of other people now care that the people behind the curtain of the internet do have that information.

I am not sure how to fix it, or if this is just the price of living in our new high-speed culture. Either way, raising awareness can only help shine a light on a dark part of the internet that until recently, was hidden.

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