Commentary
It's all spy in the sky
Everywhere we turn we find people scaremongering about privacy: CCTV cameras; microchips in bins; Google’s search engine, email, and Streetview; DNA databases.. But at Onzo we positively embrace all of these developments and it concerns us that those who object are going to prevent progress by using some deeply flawed arguments.
Objectors are peddling or succumbing to a central fallacy that someone is spying on us all. Liberty’s Director Shami Chakrabarti says that the perpetrators are: “monitoring.. behaviour”. This just isn’t the case. The reality is that, save for deliberate or accidental releases – against which there should be safeguards - information is stored in computers and processed by them without a human ever seeing an individual result. The time required to monitor an individual or piece together an individual history is huge as the police can attest when they investigate crimes.
Yes, this can be done as it was when on 4 August 2006 AOL Research, headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing 20 million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a three month period, intended for research purposes. The New York Times was able to locate a single individual from the released and anonymized search records by cross referencing them with phonebook listings. But in reality they could have gone through a single bin and found out a lot more about a household.
A further fallacy is that civil liberties and human rights are somehow being protected if people can be anonymous. How does the cheated wife feel about her philandering husband or the employer about his skiving employee or the school about its truant pupil – all of whom may appear on Google Streetview? How does a victim of crime feel when a criminal whose record has been expunged from the DNA database is found to be the perpetrator of that crime? Is it a civil liberty and a human right to evade detection?
All advances can be put to good or bad use. Laws will evolve to prevent bad use. But if the potential of bad use puts paid to the good use then there will be no advance at all. Stephen Fry rightly pointed out that motor cars killed people but we didn’t ban them. Indeed they continue to kill people but we still don’t ban them. On balance we find that the mobility they enable makes a positive contribution to our society.
As far as we’re concerned, increased efficiency in the targeting of advertising, which is one of the key commercial benefits that is being exploited, is a good thing. The pointless waste of advertising is there for all to see. Junk mail through the letterbox offers hearing aids, uPVC windows and doors, and insurance, none of which are needed right now in our office. Royal Junk Mail is having the restrictions lifted on how much of the stuff it can deliver to us, so expect more. Time, money and natural resources are being wasted to no avail.
But if a computer “knows” more about an individual, it can select information much more accurately. We like relevant advertising when we’re searching the web. We like to receive catalogues unprompted from companies we haven’t heard of that are relevant to our interests. We don’t want suspicion ever to fall on any of us that we might have committed a serious crime when we haven’t. Onzo sees many benefits from being identified and offers being personalised. We like to leave a footprint on the internet so that people with whom we’ve lost touch can find us, and find out what we’ve been up to. We’re not sure we want to pass anonymously through the shadows; and if we did we’d expect to have to put increasing amounts of effort into it.
We’ve found one supporter with no particular axe to grind: our old friend Martha Lane Fox. We heard her intone mellifluously “I’m really not so vexed by behavioural advertising and targeting.. as long as it’s transparent at some level and you the consumer or user have the ability to find out what is being used to your supposed benefit then I feel quite relaxed about it and I actually think it can be an exciting leap forward.. [but] you have to underpin it with proper education about the issues of identity and privacy”. People find her sensible and she’s rightly a poster-girl for dotcom success. So we hope they listen to her on this topic. The Economist points out that if people knew how data were being used “they would probably be more impressed than alarmed”.
The reality is that most people use the services because they find them useful. Google’s GMail has overtaken AOL and will probably overtake Microsoft’s Hotmail in 2010. The critics say that people are sleepwalking into disaster. They’re not wasting their time worrying about outcomes that are unlikely or will be prevented; they’re busy enjoying the benefits of excellent services for which they don’t have to pay at the point of use. This, after all, is the model that gave us ITV.
So all of us at Onzo are off to voluntarily donate our DNA to the police database, microchip our bins, get a smart meter, use email, search the web and generally help others help us. But we will keep on shredding pur private correspondence and putting it on the compost heap because the bin is a more obvious target for anyone spying and if the council is going to weigh it, we’ll save a few pennies at the same time.
