I recently acquired a smartphone. Apparently I am now among the roughly 28% of Americans who own such devices. These things are technologic wonders. However there’s a dark side. With the advent of smartphones and tablet PCs we now connect to the Internet any time & any place. At the same time these devices allow developers of web sites, games, apps, and anything else you connect to or download from the Internet, to track what you look at, purchase, and post online.
The Wall Street Journal published a series this past year, titled “What They Know,” that dissects the Internet tracking industry. Suffice it to say, there’s a technology war going on as tracking companies devise ever more sophisticated ways to gather personal information and sell it on the open market. If you’re an Internet user, there’s a good chance a tracking company has already created your virtual profile, to include age, gender, ethnicity, income, home ownership, politics, and parental status. The company may also have “scraped” and “mined” data that suggests your sexual preference, your smoking habits, whether you’re dieting, suffering from depression, or trying to get pregnant. From the GPS functionality on your smartphone it knows your physical location. In short, today’s tracking companies know more about you than your best friend.
What’s also clear is that all this information is anonymous in name only. Smartphones, for instance, transmit unique identifiers that tracking companies associate with your consumer profile. Online data can be combined with public offline data to effectively “de-anonymize” a profile. [Tracking companies generally insist that they either don’t do this or see no need to do this.]
It’s all driven by money. Businesses and search engines want to target ads to their most likely customers and they’re willing to pay top dollar for the information to do this. The more complete your online profile, the higher the selling price, so trackers are motivated to develop technology that is increasingly intrusive.
What’s more devious, and apparently common practice, is a business, say an insurance or credit card company, using online profiles to decide whether you’re the right kind of customer. Something “wrong” in your profile, maybe you never see the best credit card or life insurance offer. [This sounds suspiciously like "steering," a practice verboten in the real estate industry]
Jack Shafer, writing in online Slate magazine ("Want Web Privacy? Pay For It"), argues that we have entered into a devil’s bargain when we demand free Internet services and content: the cost of free Internet is loss of privacy. Given that I enjoy the (largely) free Pandora online radio, network via Facebook, use Google’s free Blogger blog hosting service, and employ Google or Bing to search the web every day, Shaffer suggests I better not get my knickers in a twist when ads targeting my particular demographic—white, male, 50-something, married, etc—magically show up on my web search pages.
OK, I’ll accept Shafer’s argument to a point; but many of the practices discussed in the Wall Street Journal articles would be called espionage in another context. What’s the solution? The first step is public awareness that these private Big Brothers are cataloging our daily lives. Then we need to draw a legal line between legitimate market research and spying.
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