On the Internet, nobody knows you

…that you are a dog!”

Peter Steiner  could not have imagined the deep implication of his cartoon way back in 1993. The ability to self represent one self was enabled due to a cloak of anonymity, that leveled differences due to age, sex, race, location and much more.  As the events of last year have shown, this shroud was instrumental in the build phase of the Arab Spring.

The last few weeks, internet has been lit up with the issue of privacy. This is nothing new (Eric Schmidt once famously argued that anonymity on internet was dangerous). The current furor started with Google announcing its impending consolidation of the 60 privacy policies (its user have to agree to) into ONE, starting March 1, 2012.  This news triggered a wave of reactions.  Advocates for preserving individual privacy raised an alarm that, this move will give Google a unique license to aggregate all user’s behavior into ONE place.

So will Google know more about you than even your wife..probably it does!!

Yes, you do have an option of opting out of the tracking, but, as Google warns, you would no longer be the beneficiary of more targeted ads, or your work will be replete with typos, or you will be late for your meeting due to heavy traffic on the way (these scenarios are from Google not mine).

Should this worry us? Note with a (pinch of trepidation) Google’s statement “…in some cases, we process personal information outside your own country.” Though Google does not name these countries, however, given that any global player has to play by the local rules, the degree of “privacy” of your personal data is, at best, “relative.”

Then Google caught the next flak when it was reveled that they (aided by unfriendly JavaScript snippet by an adventurous ad company) bypassed the security/privacy settings in Safari!

Then mobile apps tumbled on to the center stage of this debate, when it came to light that PATH has been dipping into your address books without your permission. They were not alone as many more apps are “guilty” of collecting personal information without your “direct” consent or knowledge.  FTC raised an alarm when their survey found out, that most mobile apps for kids failed to take parental permission. The Commission lamented “it is almost impossible to figure out which apps collect data and what they do with it.”

This week Facebook took its own share of blame when a report pointed out that its mobile apps are merrily reading the text messages being sent from the smart phones!

All this heat in the media space prompted President Obama to announce that the consumers need a Privacy Bill of Rights to protect against mobile operators and Internet Service providers.

In the eye of the storm

While this firestorm rages and the privacy advocates hyperventilate, the victims (everybody else) are standing calmly, without any outward sign of panic. They may be feeling a bit claustrophobic, stalked by the pesky ads that follow them everywhere on the internet, but there is no evidence that they are curtailing their usage of mobile apps or shying away from their favorite sites. On the other hand all major mobile carriers are choking bandwidth to users, due to the heavy data usage (around 5GB per month) on mobile devices.

Shane Green (CEO of Personal.com) is probably right when he ventured that a user should have more control of the personal information, and, should be able to choose to share it publicly, to make money or for other benefits. Make sense as why should only Internet companies mint gold from your personal data!

While privacy war will settle into an uneasy ceasefire ( and some unlikely alliances) between the data producers and data miners, one thing is certain that come March 1, we will take a step closer to eroding anonymity on the Internet.

Come tomorrow Google will definitely know you are the dog on the other end!