Farewell to Android
Klout is FarmVille for grown-ups
Does Flash matter on mobile?
What is Twitter?Picture the scene: you go to your local supermarket and buy ten items. As the items are scanned by the shop assistant, each one is logged in a computer database. When you complete your purchase and leave the store, a record of what you bought remains. Although, it's not actually a record of what you bought at all. It's a record of what somebody bought.
Next week, you go back to the same store and buy 25 items. Three of these items match three items from last week's visit. Now the computer knows that you're likely to buy these three items together. Except that it doesn't know that: all it knows is that someone might like to buy these three items together.
That same computer receives similar purchase reports from the supermarket chain's 1,000 stores. Each store serves - say - a thousand shopping visits a day. So each week, one computer receives anonymous market reports on 7 million shopping visits. That data is vital to the supermarket for planning supply and for optimizing its service.
Very few people complain about stores collating this kind of data, and for good reason. The data is anonymous (assuming you eschew loyalty cards). So the focus of collecting this data must be understanding customers' shopping habits. Not you, singular, but you plural.
The internet works in a similar way. The top 1,000 websites provide a vast amount of services and content, generally for free. Together, the top 1,000 websites employ thousands of people. You might think that these people are volunteers, or that they're paid by wealthy internet philanthropists complete with top hat and monocle, who fund the web out of the goodness of their own hearts. Of course, that's not how it works.
The internet is a marketplace, where a lot of the top 1,000 websites are making money despite the fact they offer generally free services and/or content. A large part of the money in this marketplace is generated by advertising, though lots is generated in traditional product sales as well. These two business lines are very different but they share one main need: accurate data about what users are doing. The more data a company has, the better it knows its users.
A website with more than a few million visitors a month will be spending plenty of time analyzing its traffic and visitors, from a technical point of view (shaping traffic, predicting peaks), from a content point of view ("Did the change we made to the homepage affect bounce rate?") and from a business point of view ("What sort of users tend to convert, and what can we do to boost that sort of traffic?").
But none of these people will be looking at you personally and saying "Hey, I see Bob's come in from Google again". That's because a major website would need to employ tens of thousands of people just for that sort of snooping data analysis. And frankly, you're just not worth that much. That is, you - the single user who might be worried about privacy because you read a hundred articles a month on websites that should know better - you, the individual user - are not that interesting from a statistical point of view.
That's what statistics are all about and once you understand that, you'll be able to start using Facebook again and sleep peacefully in the knowledge that for a tiny price: a snippet of anonymous data about where you go on the web and what you click... you, an unknown and statistically uninteresting grain of sand - get to use loads of cool websites for free. It's not a bad deal.
Good article. I've often thought the same thing. Although we need to exercise some caution when online there's no need to act like sodding Big Brother's watching our every move.
I agree with most of what you wrote. Facebook is a different matter though: I do not want ANY company to make information public which I chose to share only with a specific group of people. Without even asking me. They have shown several times now that they don't have any respect for their users privacy choices and deliberately make their "privacy" options complicated.
@Marvin, are you sure? I've had my privacy settings pretty tight for ages, and every time Facebook change the user agreement or update how you control privacy, my settings have always been maintained. I don't love Facebook, but the control users get over privacy is fantastic. I've never used a service that gave me so much control. Most criticism of them seems misplaced, as they go out of their way to allow users to keep control over their info.
What about with domain whois services if I want to buy a domain do I "need" to pay extra to make it private?
Wow, where's the foresight here? While some of what you wrote MAY be true TODAY, think about in a couple years time when data collection becomes even more precise. Those "tens of thousands" of people will be replace by software, making it cheap.. and they even if you're not "worth that much", every penny counts. For example think what google knows about you: The videos you watch (youtube), your friends (buzz, gmail), ever site you visit (with analyitics, adwords). Combine this with ever search you've done. You could easily come up with a personality profile for you. You don't think they could tie all that info into a more and more precise package? You don't think it's every marketers dream to match personality profile with buying habits. I'm not worried about my privacy today.. but what is gathered today.. is going to affect your future.
@TheDude - You're right that Google does have a chance to collect a lot of data. They don't link all of that data currently, but of course it's a possibility in the future. That still doesn't worry me too much: mainly because everything will be done by computers putting me into subsets of users... If you want to worry about privacy, worry about your ISP which IS collecting and storing identifiable information about everything you do online. Oh and Dude: keep on abiding.
Privacy is always a concern even data regardless how limited the info is. From what I heard, there have been times where hackers hacked Google and used the data to get private information that wasn't so anonymous. Imagine if one of the hackers was a pedophile and got the surfing habits of the kid's family. He could piece together when the parents were home and everything. I don't believe in being paranoid but to act like privacy concerns are wrong is like saying it's wrong to force your children not to to talk to strangers. It's wrong not to trust websites with your privacy information. Privacy is always a concern no matter how trivial it is. Pirate Bay got hacked and all that Private information was available to the hackers. Is that concern wrong?