Wired Weighs in about Google and Privacy
August 16, 2008
Much of the information in the article by Ryan Singel in Wired here has been floating at conferences and in lunch conversations for almost a month. Mr. Singel in his “Google Privacy Practices Worse than ISP Snooping AT&T Charges” pulls together threads about AT&T’s view of Google here. You will want to read the article. For me, the most interesting point was this quote from the reassembling Ma Bell:
AT&T does not at this time engage in practices that allow it to track a consumer’s search and browsing activities across multiple unrelated websites for the purpose [of] developing a profile of a particular consumer’s online behavior.
Permit to offer several personal observations about the notion of monitoring by companies who intermediate digital flows:
- Monitoring can be narrowly defined or more broadly defined. The fact is that monitoring is performed at multiple points by multiple parties. Without precise definitions, assertions about what an intermediary does or does not do are subject to interpretations.
- Intermediaries want to know about users for the purpose of “owning” the customer. In the present environment, security and ad monitoring are “in addition to” not “instead of” a long standing characteristic of intermediaries to obtain information in order to “serve” customers better.
- Today any intermediary can use a variety of mechanisms to monitor, track, and use tracking data. These data can be fine grained; that is, about a specific user with a stateful session. Alternatively, an anonymous user can be placed in one or more clusters and then be “refined” as more data arrive.
Wired has taken an important step. More information about the data models in use for usage data are needed. More information about tracking and usage methods available to large intermediaries is also needed. Finally, with the emergence of “janitor” technology that can automatically clean up ambiguities, more information about this suggestive innovation is needed as well. I want more information, not just assertions.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2008
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[…] ScottGu Much of the information in the article by Ryan Singel in Wired here has been floating at conferences and in lunch conversations for almost a month. Mr. Singel in his “Google Privacy Practices Worse than ISP Snooping AT&T Charges” pulls together threads about AT&T’s view of Google … […]