As Google acts, the question is: have we lost our privacy to the internet?
The rise of the internet, from obscurity to ubiquity in the course of a few decades, has had profound effects on our society and on us as individuals. No one could have predicted how significant it would become, and no one can predict with any certainty how it will develop.
This is true of the underlying technologies, but it is equally and, arguably more importantly, true of the changes that the internet has on how we communicate and interact with each other. It has brought us an overwhelming range of benefits, providing a universal tool to communicate, to organise our lives and to access entertainment.
What concerns me most is that this tool brings with it risks that we simply haven’t grasped. Social networks encourage us to share every aspect of our lives with our friends, but, by providing that service, those networks see everything that we share, and use that information to categorise, profile and predict us. These services aren’t “free” – we pay for them with our personal data, and the profits are huge.
It could be argued, and often is by the heads of large technology companies, that privacy is dead and that the benefits of social networks and similar services easily outweigh the perceived loss of privacy. I would argue that we do not yet fully understand the power of the data we have shared, and that by unwittingly giving this information to Google, Facebook and others we are shaping the future of our society in ways we cannot predict.
For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google.
As Google acts, the question is: have we lost our privacy to the internet?
The rise of the internet, from obscurity to ubiquity in the course of a few decades, has had profound effects on our society and on us as individuals. No one could have predicted how significant it would become, and no one can predict with any certainty how it will develop.
This is true of the underlying technologies, but it is equally and, arguably more importantly, true of the changes that the internet has on how we communicate and interact with each other. It has brought us an overwhelming range of benefits, providing a universal tool to communicate, to organise our lives and to access entertainment.
What concerns me most is that this tool brings with it risks that we simply haven’t grasped. Social networks encourage us to share every aspect of our lives with our friends, but, by providing that service, those networks see everything that we share, and use that information to categorise, profile and predict us. These services aren’t “free” – we pay for them with our personal data, and the profits are huge.
It could be argued, and often is by the heads of large technology companies, that privacy is dead and that the benefits of social networks and similar services easily outweigh the perceived loss of privacy. I would argue that we do not yet fully understand the power of the data we have shared, and that by unwittingly giving this information to Google, Facebook and others we are shaping the future of our society in ways we cannot predict.
For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google.
