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The New York Times
Opinion
The Already Big Thing
on the Internet:
Spying on Users
By ADAM COHEN,
Editorial Observer, nytimes.com on the Web, April 5, 2008
It’s time for Congress to give the
digital age a privacy upgrade.
In 1993, the dawn of the Internet
age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known
New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another:
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that
anonymity is gone.
It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.
Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software
slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit,
the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information
that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and
they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting
into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of
everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have
started to sell the information they collect.
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in
online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can
charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car
that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged
men.
The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and
more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular
Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites,
buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of
privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm ... I
wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s
laptop?”)
The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile.
Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it
cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a
particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of.
And privacy policies can be changed at any time.
There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that
collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which
have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders
are alcoholics or have AIDS.
It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena
to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored).
If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim
picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism.
There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the
government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.
The public has been slow to express outrage — not, as tech companies like to
claim, because they don’t care about privacy, but simply because few people know
all that is going on. That is changing. “A lot of people are creeped-out
by this,” says Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and
Technology. He says the government is under increasing pressure to act.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for
companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the
problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to
gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal
do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on.
That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating
principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet
activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent.
The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against
illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about
protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more
recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications.
Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy
protection.
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