June 4, 2007

Net Privacy? There is None

Sometimes personal computers are not so personal. Whether it is your co-worker who needs to check his email in a rush or your 12-year-old daughter in desperate need to access Wikipedia, our search engines are in high demand.

This often leads to innocent, albeit rather embarrassing confrontations. Last week a friend needed to look up an address on my laptop. The name of the hair salon started with the same letter as my current love interest’s name. Let us ignore the question of why I was Googling his name in the first place and focus on the awkwardness of the situation.

Yes, I probably should have turned the AutoSave off, but I really did not expect company the day I ventured out to see what high school he went to. Cyber stalking is an issue, and I am not helping things, I know. To be fair, he put that MySpace account up voluntarily.

What is a little more disturbing is that information more private than that is readily available to people outside my social circle. Over the course of the past few weeks, major search engines, including Yahoo! and Google, have come under criticism in Europe.

Peter Fleisher of Google’s global privacy counsel told the BBC, “We will never transfer to third parties, including advertisers, any personally identifiable information about our users – that includes IP addresses and account details." When pressed, he did admit that Google shared data with third parties.

Now that they mention it, it is not such a surprise after all. If like me you use Gmail, you have been offered discount car rentals in Detroit on the right hand side of the email you received from a friend describing his fishing trip in Michigan.

I do not find it too disconcerting that advertisers out there know I like Target and read The New York Times. I am concerned about the apparent lack of discrimination in what information is stored and passed on when it comes to what health related sites I visit. Or that I check my bank statements and immediately search “student loan help.”

With every search and site visit, we make a testament about who we are, where we are and most importantly, what we need. Every time a website asks for your zip code, it pinpoints your location. If you look for Rosh Hashanah decorations year after year, it is likely that you are not a pious Mormon. You may be, but the advertisers will take their chances.

Officials and lawyers working for the search engines are quick to point to the Privacy Policy statements that none of us read and just click ‘accept’ to get to what we need. “You agreed!”  Well yes, but that does not make your policy any less slimy.

Cleaning your history and removing all the cookies you can are the best we can do in the short run. Nevertheless, in the larger scheme of things, the access to user-friendly and transparent service is the obligation of the corporations.