Well, I did it. I deactivated my FB account. Initially, what started out as a training exercise in AJAX and Web 2.0 programming and interface design, transitioned into a time consuming and all too pervasive display of my life. Maybe old age and paranoia have set in. The Internet knows too much about me, it was time to get out.
Exaggeration I hear you say? Not really, lets look at it.
There is a little bit of "technology" called Google Analytics for example. It's free, it's used on a LOT of web sites, including all of mine. It's a traffic/statistical analyser for web sites. With the inclusion of a few lines of code in the master template (and therefore on every page), Google can see what, when and who visits every page on my site. But take this to the global perspective. Rough guess, I would think 25% of web sites probably use GA now. That means Google know about a quarter of the pages you visit. They know what you search for. They know the adverts you click on. They know they keywords and page descriptions of the sites you visit. If you use Google mapping products with your mobile, they know where you are. Have you got a Gmail account, well then they can read your emails, know your date of birth and gender, along with your mother's maiden name. The IP address you connect from at home gives away your location as well. They own YouTube, so they know the videos you watch. It is serious enough for Germany, as a country, to consider BANNING the use of Analytics.
This is a terrifying amount of information for one company to have access to, even if they promise not to misuse it and the above scenarios only cover about a third of their products. But what assurance have you really got that big brother isn't watching? What is to say it is not logged forever? Not that it matters that Google work out I like watching porn, that would come as no surprise to my friends, but still ... ;-p
So what about Facebook? Who owns Facebook? Microsoft owns a slab, as does PayPal apparently. What does this mean? So now Microsoft have their Bing search engine, they have searching history for you perhaps? PayPal is used on many websites for payment processing - they know what you are buying. PayPal is also tied up with eBay from memory. Gets you thinking.
The big ticket item for me however is the advances in image processing technology. I would put money on it that within a year Facebook will have facial recognition software for auto-tagging of photos. Seems a cool idea until you realise that this can then be used to link you to who you "hang out" with as well. They can also add in something like Google Goggles to process your images and geo-tag them. So they will then know who you were with when you were at the Eiffel Tower (say), even randoms in the background.
The icing on the cake is the Australian Government's joke of an idea - the Clean Feed Internet filtering debacle. They are going to spend millions of dollars on something that won't make a difference, so they can get some headlines and suck up to some of the Independents. Glad to see my hard earned dollars at work guys. Top stuff. What has this got to do with privacy? At the moment, all web requests are fairly anonymous packets of data flying around, so far as the routers and ISP's are concerned. Yes, the traffic is analysed at the end points as mentioned above with Google Analytics, but the ISP's are a little more trusted in my opinion. This conversation doesn't include Telstra's implementation of a proxy for iPhone use, but that is another battle.
What the Government is planning to legislate, is to force ISP's to "analyse" my web traffic and decide if I am allowed to view it or not, based on some list. Ok, chances are if I am viewing something on this list, I probably shouldn't be, but that is not entirely my beef. This data will be logged! Sure as hell. So now Google knows what I'm viewing, the Government knows what I'm viewing, the ISP knows what I'm viewing. Where does it stop? What right to privacy and anonymity online have I got?
This is starting to get out of hand.
Processing and storage technologies are advancing so fast, that this data will be able to be stored, not just for a day, week or month, but in perpetuity. The business intelligence and data warehousing technologies are already there to analyse this for trends.
So now all of this data is out there about me - who is safeguarding it? What happens when, not if, my ISP gets hacked and the hacker gets access to the logs of my browsing history. They will know what bank I use for example. From query strings in the logs they will be able to work out far far too much. Query strings hold a lot of identifiers and account names for example.
Next Australia Post will have to open main to ensure it complies with our censorship laws!
Rant over. Time to unplug and get a place in the country ;-p