Garrett Saundry
So It’s late on a Wednesday night, you’re sitting at home in front of your computer in your fuzzy bunny slippers and your red flannel pyjamas with the monkeys all over them. You’re surfing some of the more interesting websites that you can’t go to at work or doing some online shopping because you’re pretty darn lazy and can’t be bothered to leave the house. The assumption here is that you’re in the privacy of your own home with nobody able to see or tell what you’re doing. If you choose to pass the evening with a finger deep in one nostril it’s your choice, and barring you forgetting to turn off your webcam nobody will ever know.
How private is the internet though? You’d may be surprised to learn that it’s not very private at all. A little background for those that may not be so technical. An IP address is how computers identify themselves and communicate over the internet. They also act as identifiers for devices which can range from IP phones to personal computers. There is a brewing confrontation between privacy regulators and big internet companies as to how the information gathered about your IP address and to a lesser extent yourself is used and shared.
The European Union’s group of privacy regulators have said that your IP address should be regarded as personal information. Internet search engines argue that your IP address simply identifies the location of your computer. This is technically true, however it doesn’t seem to take into account that people will generally use the same terminal and IP address. Now this approach doesn’t always work considering that some of these IP addresses are assigned to computers at an internet cafe, or end up being offices shared by several people.
We’ll take a look at how one of the giants of online advertising – Google handles your personal information and what they do with it.
Google’s argument is that it needs your IP address to identify your location and push the most relevant search engine results. For example, if you perform two search queries using Google on the term ‘football’ from London, England and Toronto, Ontario, you will get very different results. If you read Google’s privacy policy, they come right out and say that they collect personal information from you. They have recently reduced the time that they saved stored search information from 30 years to two. That’s still an awful lot of information that they’re storing about you. Chances are that Google knows more about you, your searches, the websites you visit and your online shopping habits than you think you know about yourself. It translated this information into $4.2 billion worth of net income in 2007 alone.
Google has recently turned heads by buying DoubleClick, a company that’s pretty notorious for it’s abuses of your privacy. DoubleClick is an online digital marketing company. Sounds pretty innocuous right? Well they’re the people responsible for most of that annoying online advertising you see on almost every webpage you pull up. They used something called intelligent targeting for advertisers, and this supposedly used online and offline data to construct consumer profiles on you so that they could better target advertising. They create profiles, which contain information such as your IP address, domain, browser, operating system and page viewed. They had several Federal lawsuits brought against them in the USA, however those were all settled and the ad targeting strategy scrapped. DoubleClick was purchased by Google in April of 2007 for $3.1 billion in cash, the purchase was approved in December 2007 after anti trust concerns were raised and dismissed by the Federal Trade Commission, who ruled that the acquisition would be unlikely to substantially lessen competition.
Competition aside, it’s the privacy issue that got people talking. Google derives most of it’s revenue from advertising, and with the purchase of DoubleClick who has a rather shady way of tracking your online habits a red flag has been raised with regards to what information Google stores about you, how long they keep it, what they do with it and who they share it with. Google tries to keep their image squeaky clean, but in closely examining their privacy it’s vague enough to keep the lawyers happy and to keep you guessing at it’s intent and meaning, and wondering just how much of your information is actually kept private.
When it comes down to it, you should be aware that pretty much everything you do and everywhere you go on the internet leaves it’s digital footprint that can be tracked back to your IP address, and to a lesser extent yourself. This information is, for the most part, used to sell you more stuff in the form of online advertising. I know for myself it does make me somewhat uncomfortable to know that deep in the bowels of a Google dataplex, there’s a file with my name on it, containing pretty valuable and personal information that I have absolutely no control over.