July 14, 2008 | In: Uncategorized
User Privacy Isn’t About Information Protecting, it’s About Information Collecting
I used to work for a company that generated most of its revenue from lead generation. It was a web publication where users registered to see premium content. We would work with big companies like IBM and Microsoft to sponsor webcasts and we would give the contact information of the users who viewed these webcasts to the respective sponsors. The users agreed to this in the Terms and Conditions and all was done fair and legally. This is how many free sites make their money. They sell your contact information to the highest bidder. I always had a problem with this concept. I’m not giving companies my contact information so they could sell it to the highest bidder. But what choice do I have?
With the new slew of web 2.0 companies, we’ve seen a backlash of sorts regarding this issue. One of the many definitions of web 2.0 is user-centricity. It’s all about pleasing the user. That means you don’t give away your users’ contact information. Wonderful. Out contact information is safe. Right? Well, in a recent court case, Google is forced to provide Viacom the usernames, IP addresses and online activity of all of their YouTube users. Apparently our information isn’t safe.
Michael Arrington at Techcrunch makes a good point about who is to blame here. Everyone wants to blame Viacom and it’s understandable. It’s an organization that has decided to fight their customers rather than work with them. Viacom is in the group of other media companies who have pushed the legal limits to track down people who love their content and sue them.
As Arrington points out, the real company to blame here is Google. Google is the one collecting this information on us. Until now, they thought (as did we), that our information was safe. Apparently, we were both wrong. Google needs to change their policy on how they track their users. For one thing, Google needs to make sure that any information on their servers cannot track someone down. That means no IP address saving, no mailing address saving, no credit card saving, etc….Secondly, (this might just be a marketing ploy) but we want a user contract. We want to know what information you save, how you use it, and who has access to it.
Viacom is evil, but Google is now their tool. Google needs to eliminate the possibility that our information will be used to track us down. That doesn’t mean hiring better lawyers. It means stop saving our personal information.
5 Responses to User Privacy Isn’t About Information Protecting, it’s About Information Collecting
Cobas
July 15th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Google actually agreed to supply a sanitized version of their database to Viacom, with usernames and IP addresses blanked out:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/212226/google-wins-agreement-to-anonymise-youtube-logs.html
Ely Rosenstock
July 15th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I read about that too. I’m impressed with Viacom here. They didn’t have to agree to this new agreement but they did. From what I’ve read, Viacom never wanted people’s personal info from Google (or so they claim). We have a new enemy – tech-dumb judges.
dgandhi
July 29th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
How does the DMCA and like legislation tie Google’s hands here?
My recollection is that companies which provide services online, most notably ISPs, but I think SAS companies might be tied in, are required to keep tracking information so that intellectual “property” “crime” can be tracked down, and if they don’t they are held legally liable for the crime.
The viacom-google “compromise” is still a compromise of the users info, no matter how you look at it, the greeking and “no analysis” clauses are toothless, and powerless against anybody who knows regular expressions.
The moral of the story SAS has an Achilles heal, and it’s stupid laws developed by copy monopolies, and enforced by ignorant judges.
Hold your own data, or it’s not yours.
Michael Willson
August 4th, 2008 at 12:02 am
A recent article, written July 31, 2008 by Nate Anderson for http://arstechnica.com, explores the idea of privacy. In summary, Google took photos of a residence that was on a long driveway that was marked “private road.” There were already photos of the residence at the county assessor’s office and Google pointed out to a judge the photos.
About privacy they said, “. . . no one today has complete privacy. Except, perhaps, hermits.”
To further quote the article:
“Google basically says that it’s up to people to scan Street View themselves, pick out photos that might be private, then notify the company. Staying off of private roads isn’t Google’s problem; it’s the homeowner’s.”
“At every point in its legal response, Google passes off the complaints over Street View as simply too petty too bother with—even as it admits that its driver may, in fact, have driven past a sign marked “private road” to take the photo.”
Is Google concerned about our privacy? According to this article, it sounds as if the only concession they make is to begrudgingly let us remove information if we can discover it ourselves. And they would be the search engine we would use to find that information.
To me, Google is starting to sound a little evil.
TheFunded Respects Its Users « Crastinate
August 12th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
[...] want to have a member directory, save an email address with permission. I have written about this previously when speaking about Google but this approach applies to all websites. TheFunded has respected its [...]