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Tickertape lives of ones and zeros
By Brennon Slattery
del.ico.us
reddit!
The Big Brother 1984 analogy has withered gray. We all realize our library records are scanned, our phones are tapped, our internet purchases reviewed and ridiculed by some suit in a windowless office somewhere in Washington DC.
We've brought much of this upon ourselves, operating seemingly benign applications that are deceptively aware of our pulses. The Holiday 2007 Facebook Beacon fiasco—in which a widget broadcast user purchases at external websites—opened a few drowsy eyelids. But maybe you haven't noticed that Google ads are alarmingly evolved and specific. Since 2004, Google has amassed an enormous fortune (about $150 billion), and now leads in online advertising. In early March 2008, Google purchased DoubleClick, a developer and provider of online ad services, for $3.1 billion, thereby skyrocketing its pervasive control.
The methodology is simple: DoubleClick and Google track consumer interests based on HTTP cookies and IP addresses. Whatever you look at—be it poodles or porn—Google knows, and ads appear with their interpretation of you in mind.
Microsoft and Yahoo! both strongly opposed Google's buyout of DoubleClick, claiming it stank of monopoly and endangered customer privacy. Ironically, Microsoft was beheaded and staked by the European Union to the tune of 497 million euros for abuse of its dominant position in the market according to anti-monopoly laws. Microsoft also recently placed an unsolicited bid of $40 billion for Yahoo!, the results of which are still undetermined. How's that for monopoly? As far as privacy goes, Microsoft has a long list of privacy violations stemming from automatic updates to its Windows XP platform—including a high-profile case brought against the company by a Beijing student claiming Microsoft inundated his computer with spyware.
One of Google's proposed projects is to digitize our health records and store them on their massive database—a revolutionary step toward streamlining otherwise tousled data. It could also be a hacker's delight; an orgy of identity theft.
On a smaller scale, I recently embedded the tracking tool Google Analytics into my blog to see whom visits, from whence they came, and how they arrived. The dearth of information is startling. For instance, I know that someone from New South Wales, Australia, using Firefox on a dialup connection from ispOne Wholesale Internet Solutions, found my page by Googling "swapping panties." All this for a Blogspot site. Broaden this by eight hundred billion and you have an idea of how transparent we are.
Until the US government controls the internet—an abhorrent, disastrous prospect—one cannot expect to fling personal tidbits like 52-card pickup without consequence. We've constructed this massive electronic bed of ones and zeroes yet complain when the springs break. Instead, we should lie down, bare-naked—accept the walls we've razed and raised. We must know and understand the technology we use on a daily basis, as that's the only way to exist without surprise. Otherwise we're sitting in rooms we thought were empty, trying to deny they're crowded.
HTTP://LOOKBACKINANGER.BLOGSPOT.COM
