How protective of your privacy are you when you use the Internet?
Let me rephrase that.
How protective of your privacy do you think you are when you use the Internet?
20 years ago, when you went into a “big box retailer”, you knew they had security cameras; but none of us contemplated the retailer watching literally everything we did in the store. Times have changed.
Today, millions of us go to Amazon and give no thought to the fact that Amazon is watching every move you make. But in a half-full/half-empty manner, let’s think about that for a second.
Is Amazon doing that to:
- Help you find the things you need?
Or
- Sell you more things?
I believe that whether we’ve intended to or not, as a society we’ve assigned the more benign “they’re helping me” attribution.
Truth be told, it’s not just Amazon. Any site with much knowledge at all is doing the same thing. They’re using your behavior to help you help them. In a study that is now almost 2 years old (and I believe dated in that the Google numbers are probably trending up considerably now) John Hossack of VKI Studios asked, “Is Google Analytics Taking Over the World?”
Omniture now part of Adobe, and numerous other analytics packages help site owners monitor, optimize, and enhance the experience provided through their sites. Google, being the leading source of organic search to just about every site on the Internet, is in an eerily powerful position to help clarify exactly how visitors arrived on your site, and what they were looking for in order to land there (and how you can prevent them “bouncing” (leaving to another site).
To a certain degree, you get to determine what these analytics tools know. To another degree, you don’t.
Long ago, your IP address (the network address that defines your connection to the Internet) was randomly assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). For most of us on broadband connections, the connection is always up, always on, and rarely renews to a new IP address. Instead, our IP address has become eerily as static as the address of our home. Cookies, often misunderstood, once considered evil, now largely just a fact of life, allow a longer-term, much more persistent capacity for analytics vendors to define you. Additionally, while cookies were intended to be “single-site” (owned by a given website, inaccessible to others), analytics vendors have become so ubiquitous that your behavior on one site can to a certain degree affect how you interact with another.
Think about this scenario:
You walk into an actual grocery store you have never been in for the first time. You find 12 things around the store that you add to your cart, looking at 5 more items before deciding not to buy those. You check out and go home.
Next week you go back to the same grocery store, you are warmly greeted by name as you enter the store (by someone you’ve never been introduced to) and the 12 items you purchased are right by the entrance, with the 5 items you didn’t buy just beyond them.
This process repeats such that by the time you visit the grocery store 10 times or so, everything you tend to buy at that store is right within the first aisle, optimized just for you. When your significant other comes with you, their items are interspersed in with yours.
You have three ways to look at that scenario. There’s:
- “That’s AWESOME, it’ll save me so much time!!!”
- “Holy CRAP” that’s creepy!!! I don’t want someone watching me like that!”
- “That’s a bit of an invasion of my privacy, but it’s worth it for now.”
The reality is that for most consumers, they’ll say 1. Some paranoid folks like myself will say 2, and a tiny minority remaining will say 3.
In order to understand how you are losing your privacy every time you do almost anything on the Internet, you really have to take a step back and reconsider what your privacy is. For most people, it’s doesn’t bother them that much in the scenario above since, as Eric Schmidt stated, they aren’t doing anything wrong.
However think about this one step further.
You go into the grocery store, and they offer you an over the counter anti-heartburn medication, even though you had never bought it or anything even in the same aisle before. When you ask the manager why they offered it to you, he simply tells you, “Google Analytics told us you had been searching on ‘acid reflux’, so we thought it might help you.”
Now revisit those three choices above and tell me again - is that still “helpful”, or has it switched to “creepy” yet?
