The cost of progress? Your privacy.
20 years ago, you might have thought that if there was ever as much as information as there is now, personal information would be more secure owing to the fact that it would be hard to find. That, of course, has been proven wrong, but it is not because there isn’t a lot of information out there.* Rather, it’s because we have extremely good tools for organizing and accessing that information.
But how is it that search engines are so good, anyway?
The simple answer is that they use your past searches (check at about 10:23) as an indicator of what you’ll search for next. Turns out that about 40% of your searches are repeated over a period of somewhere between 6 months and a year from initial search, and the searches that you are looking at are probably the best available indicator of what you are interested in, and thus they can use that to tell what you are more likely to want to see next. If you don’t believe this is effective, just take a look at the so-called privacy-sensitive search engines, Duck Duck Go and Cuil, which store no (or very little) information. They’re not as impressive, are they?
But the real issue here is not that you can improve your searches by storing information. The problem is that people need to feel comfortable when other people know stuff about them. Consider this post by Asa Dotzler an eminent employee of Mozilla Corp, who writes about the Eric Schmidt privacy comment debacle. Mr Dotzler ends up suggesting Bing as an alternative to Google, saying “There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here.” Meaning Eric Schmidt was wrong to say what he said.
Of course, it is besides the point to remember that cutting away just before the subject answers the question and simply editing in the part of the response the interviewers want to show (as well as not supplying the full context of the surrounding conversation) is, literally, the definition of taking a comment out of context. What is the point is that the appearance of evil, regardless of whether Mr Schmidt actually meant what is being interpreted, is damning. Users would rather not know that this is what someone would think. Also never mind the fact that the ruthless competitor-oriented business practices and consistent, outright ignoring of consumer needs by Microsoft do not indicate a respect for users that one would imagine translate to good privacy policies, and that Google does actually have a good track record, even considering recent problems. I suppose that when you’re a good guy, your screw-ups are more visible.
Besides, it may be that there is a way to get great results and still not store this information, but let’s face it: there currently is no viable alternative to Google and/ or Bing. In other words, if you need something, you pay the price by letting these companies store information about your surfing habits and, by extension, you. Not everything can be traced back to you, sure, but a lot can. And it’s not just Google. It’s Facebook too. MySpace sells your data.
And if your privacy isn’t raped in those cases, it almost certainly is in the fact that these powerful tools for organizing information make it very easy to find naked pictures of your wife and incriminating posts you’ve made on a blog or twitter.
No, let’s face it: privacy doesn’t really exist anymore. But this is not the end of the world. If history has taught us anything, it’s that culture is resilient, and while the law is certainly behind, that doesn’t mean it can’t catch up, or that culture can’t change. And what we have gained in return from the backwards sexting laws and the lack of feeling secure may be something better: a huge change in information breathability.
In other words, you might choose not to use Google or Bing, but reporters don’t, and the people who work in business don’t, and your teachers don’t. And every one of them is vastly more able to be well informed than anyone was in 1990. Consider that, to learn anything, you used to have to visit a library. This days, if you want to know about something that used to require technical schooling, like the recent economic collapse, you just hit up Google.
The choice is this: anyone, anywhere can do something that resonates with anyone; with so much information, you can almost always find exactly what you’re looking for, which was certainly NOT the case even in the 1990s; you can find out what is happening in something like an an atomic bomb (and even if a source is too technical, you can look elsewhere instantly, which used not to be the case).
In other words, you can choose all that, or you can have a feeling of comfort. The protesters in Iran can have an automatic world stage, or you can choose security. The chinese can blog about human rights abuses, or life we can make privacy airtight. I can’t tell you which is necessarily better, but I can say that I’d make the trade every time.
* Not entirely related, but if all spam suddenly disappeared, we would save an amount of energy roughly equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road every year. That’s a lot of information.
