PRIVACY IN THE FACEBOOK ERA

So how do you value your privacy in the Facebook age ?  I was reviewing some of my old blogs from last year and found this one I did in July last year.  It is even more relevant now than it was then.  So if you did not read it before then please check it out.    Next blog will be on gaming - watch this space.

Does it matter to you that the calls you make, the emails you send, your credit card transactions, the Internet sites you visit, the images of you travelling to work, your social networking posts are now stored at data centres in the Cloud and retrievable by myriad marketers, Government agencies and companies ?    None of whom you ever entrusted with your information in the first place. Your digital footprint is a permanent record of your every move.

Data is the pollution of the Information age. Everything we do generates data, and a secondary spin-off of Moores law is that every year it gets cheaper to store and process this data. So rather than sort through our e-mails and delete the ones we don’t need – we just keep them all – it is easier and cheaper to do so. The same thing happens with all of our data now.

Most of ‘your’ data actually belongs to someone else. All of your G-mails, everything you post on Facebook, all of your Amazon transactions – this information belongs to those companies who then harness this information to maximize their advertising revenue and to optimize the selection of products they want you to buy. The data gathered usually has a primary purpose such as the airlines frequent flyer programs where your travel needs are customized (your seating requirements and meal choices ), while its secondary purpose is to target you with a holiday special to some exotic destination, once sold to a 3rd party marketing company.

The data we generate has value – whether to a company seeking to sell us more product or to a Government agency who is trying to track a terrorist cell. The utility of this data depends on its accuracy – so what may be useful to a marketing company such as your age, salary band and postal code will be insufficient for a National Security Agency . Companies are able increasingly to use this data to control their customers. Think about iTunes and the iPhone and how Apple has managed to control the whole eco-system end to end from the device to the content to the retail process. This is not necessarily a bad thing – users are happy to have this managed for them especially as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and complex.

But what happens when you lose control of your data ? When your information is unwittingly exposed to the world. This is a failure of security. But do you care? This is where the issue of the new generation gap becomes relevant. The Internet generation gap. The younger generation seem to be far more relaxed about their information being made public. They are living their lives ‘in public.’ What they did last night at a party is posted onto Facebook either by themselves or their friends. For the whole world to see. This is ‘normal.’

So what seperates these ‘digital natives ‘ (those who have grown up with the Internet, with cell-phones, in the digital age with ubiquitous connectivity) from those of us who grew up when vinyl was still de rigueur , who watched TV according to a schedule; Generation X’ers who grew up in the pre-celebrity era – when football stars were paid a living wage, when videos and CD’s were mainstream. Bruce Shneier believes this divide – this generation gap can be classified as the divide between those who ‘get ‘ Twitter’ and those who don’t. Age is not the measure; your level of acceptance and comfort with the nuances of social media, your fluency with social media, is.

The social norms of the digital natives are created by their environment, the world they were born into. Privacy in the pre-Internet age arose from the inefficiencies of prevailing technologies – telephone calls and letters were difficult to track. Now this has changed and because of the massive processing power of Googles’ search engine and other technological innovations privacy has been significantly diminished. Anyone can Google you and find you on Facebook/Twitter/Googlemail and through your friends and friends of friends they can discover a lot about you. Ask any major HR department when they interview job candidates how they do their ‘checking’ on candidates. There is not even a measure of privacy through obscurity, because even the sheer volume of data out there, is no match for the processing power of search algorithms.

In the past you categorized your friends into different groups with whom your socialized – family, school friends, work colleagues, clubs and so on. There was a natural compartmentalization between these ‘Groups’ - today it is difficult if not impossible to section off your friends into such groups. To control your privacy now you have to explicitly engage with the privacy policy on the social media site / email provider or whatever service you seek online. Many people will accept the default settings just so that they can get on with it – inadvertently leaving big holes in their privacy.

However regulators and law makers are starting to get firmer and they will have to force providers to allow users to opt in rather than to blindly accept default privacy settings. This should prevent some of the recent privacy debacles like the introduction of Google Buzz and Facebooks’ recent efforts at changing its privacy policies which saw the wholesale disclosure of peoples private information including their emails.

A good example of how the Regulators are starting to get to grips with these issues is the Code of Conduct recently published by the Information Commissioner in the UK – linked below. But remember that privacy and security do not equate. Security is about you controlling your information. It is up to your to take back control of your data and not to leave it to others. You need to start thinking more about security and how it can be used to protect your data.

But more of that another time.