If you want to keep your habits and behaviors private, turn off your Internet connection right now.
Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and MSN) have been making zillions by tracking your search terms and teeing-up ads. Now, ISPs are getting in on the racket, selling records of your visits to all sites -- along with such variables as time spent, purchases made, yadda yadda -- to firms that can crunch it all, and throw even better-targeted ads back at you.
So Big Brother isn't just watching you; he's selling to you.
Welcome to "1984" as a multi-platform marketing event.
The data analysis firms, with names like Phorm, NebuAd, and Front Porch, make claims that what they're doing is actually protecting online privacy. Complicated, branded products do things like assign random numbers to online trollers, and then claim to destroy said records after commercials have been assigned to them.
Yup. And war is peace. Love is hate. And imprisonment is freedom.
We've always loved the idea of privacy more than ever actually lived it. Life in your average little town was anything but anonymous. Everyone knew everyone else's business. Your movements, statements, associations, purchases, and even your eating habits were usually apparent to others, whether consciously pursued or simply stumbled upon.
In an era before crowds became segments, urbanization gave people a modicum of privacy, just as mass media swathed everyone in the same commercial dribble. But most people's lives on this planet have been mapped and memorized by other people far more than they've gotten away with getting away from it.
So why shouldn't we be either unconcerned, if not downright happy, that our every movement online will equip content providers to give us ever-better customized content?
Well, first off, check out whether your ISP is selling your behavior to someone else. Click on this online test, which'll find a few (but not all) of the analytics that could be keeping an eye on you (and thanks to the New Scientist for the tip).
I think the danger arises when the Internet becomes the primary spigot through which we encounter and explore the outside world. That troll through customized content could just as easily be seen as a co-opted, managed march, with search yielding not facts or truths, but biased opinion and commercials.
Forget finding anything on the Internet when the ISPs, sites, and search engines are all in cohoots to find you. While this is a wet dream right now for marketers, there's a chance that consumers could figure it out and prompt a loud backlash on protecting their privacy. This could have a negative, er, effect on the efforts of we in the business of selling stuff.
In the end, the result could be consumers monetizing their habits and behaviors, and adding their cut to the money the ISPs and search engines are making. So the margins get a little slimmer.
Or...maybe people might just start turning off their Internet-enabled devices, and searching in other ways for information (at least anonymized search, for starters)?
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