Privacy Standards?...

Google has been all over the news recently, and for good reason too.  Their new privacy policies are game changing, and controversial.   I personally think that some sharing of data between Google software is a good thing, but their must be a line drawn in the proverbial sand in order to keep our privacy intact, even if only partially.  I think that it is a nice feature.  Take for example: if you search Google.com for "Ninject and Dependancy Injection", and say Google knows you often watch videos with “How To” in the tags on YouTube.com, that Google.com search should yield some of those How-To types of videos.

However beneficial data gathering and sharing may be, it's important to know what and when information is being collected about you and your web-surfing habits.  Granted, one can basically assume that most everything you do is being tracked on the internet by one entity or another.  I am in agreement with the author of this article that if it is YOUR data, and YOUR activity, you should be able to 1) View/Change settings that dictate what you want tracked and how that data is used, 2) View all data currently relating to you, and 3) Insist on a deletion of that data as you see fit. I believe that this will be the future of data collection, and that, I've said it before, until a system that can satisfy these requirements is put into place, there will always be controversy regarding this subject.

To digress, Google's new policy is fairly intuitive, and in my opinion its main purpose is to lay the ground work for its future endeavors. One of the major downfalls that the above article points out, is that the system that Google has in place has no way, or even intention, of 'forgetting' your data. The process of opting out consists only of an 'unsubscribe' type functionality. The only thing achieved is it stops you from receiving personalized results and advertising and stops future collection, but all the data that was collected before you decided to opt-out of the feature will still be present in the system.

Interestingly the author of the article goes on to explain about his experiences with trying to access Twitter archives of Tweets. Ironically, the person who made the Tweets originally only has access to 3200 past Tweets, while the archiving services have access to Tweets made up to a few years prior.

Several European governments, the European Union, and some US organizations, have been fighting, in courts, with the search engine giant over the legality of the new privacy laws, and most of the focus is placed on the ability to be 'forgotten' and the ability to explicitly ask/opt to not be tracked at all. It's a movement that is being coined as the “Right to be forgotten law”.

This article was also interesting, one article among the hundreds that report on this Google privacy topic. If you are not a member of the Financial Times you may need to search for it. “Defiant Google rolls out privacy rules” by Maija Palmer and Tim Bradshaw of London, and Alex Barker of Brussels. Here is an excerpt showing a point of tension that is causing concern in the EU:

The new privacy rules make it possible for Google to take what it has learnt about a user from one of it's services – such as search or Gmail – and use it to tailor what the user sees on other services. The content of emails sent using Gmail might, for example, influence what advertising is shown to that person on YouTube.

France's data protection agency, the CNIL, warned this week that European regulators had 'strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness' of this use of personal data.

I tend to agree that personal emails being used to tailor an advertising experience is a bit much. I'm curious to what the other side of the game thinks, as I have yet to find any solid and logical reasoning behind this idea. If anyone has thoughts or opinions that support the usage of this data, please feel free to comment, I am very curious and welcome the challenge in opinion.

Also, I have to say that my opinion will most always be one of control over my own data. Sure, offer me a service that can personalize different aspects of my web-browsing, but at the same time I'd better be able to stop the service, see what the service has gotten from me in the past (since the beginning), request a transcription of it, and even request deletion of it. Additionally by no means should you (The business who is tracking you) need or be able to sell that information to any other person or business, regardless of terms of use and/or policy statements.