Wall Street Journal Mash Up on Internet Ethics: The Great Privacy Debate

Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers

...Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.

It's Modern Trade: Web Users Get as Much as They Give

...Data gleaned from your communications and transactions grease the gears of modern commerce.

...Through the sites we visit and the searches we make, we disclose details not only about our jobs, hobbies, families, politics and health, but also about our secrets, fantasies, even our peccadilloes.

...Most websites track users, particularly through the use of cookies,
little text files placed on Web surfers' computers.

Sites use cookies to customize a visitor's experience.

And advertising networks use cookies to gather information about users.

 ...our sense of anonymity is largely an illusion. Pretty much everything we do online, down to individual keystrokes and clicks, is recorded, stored in cookies and corporate databases, and connected to our identities, either explicitly through our user names, credit-card numbers and the IP addresses assigned to our computers, or implicitly through our searching, surfing and purchasing histories.

...computer consultant Tom Owad published the results of an experiment that provided a chilling lesson in just how easy it is to extract sensitive personal data from the Net. Mr. Owad wrote a simple piece of software that allowed him to download public wish lists that Amazon.com customers post to catalog products that they plan to purchase or would like to receive as gifts.

...Mr. Owad was able to download over 250,000 wish lists over the course of a day. He then searched the data for controversial or politically sensitive books and authors, from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" to the Koran. He then used Yahoo People Search to identify addresses and phone numbers for many of the list owners.

...Mr. Owad ended up with maps of the United States showing the locations of people interested in particular books and ideas, including George Orwell's "1984." He could just as easily have published a map showing the residences of people interested in books about treating depression or adopting a child. "It used to be," Mr. Owad concluded, "you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people."

...engineers working on a new version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser
thought they might set certain defaults to protect privacy better,
but they were overruled when the business segments at Microsoft
learned of the plan.

Are there undeletable cookies?

Jim Harper
Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute
Wall Street Journal

 ...People tend to leave lots of little pieces of information about themselves and their opinions in many different places on the Web. By identifying correspondences among the data, sophisticated algorithms can identify individuals with extraordinary precision.

...Americans can be identified by name and address using only their ZIP Code, birthday and gender—three pieces of information that people often divulge when they register at a website.

...people have come to entrust ever more intimate details about their lives to sites like Facebook and Twitter. The incorporation of GPS transmitters into cellphones and the rise of location-tracking services like Foursquare provide powerful tools for assembling moment-by-moment records of people's movements.

As reading shifts from printed pages onto networked devices like the Kindle and the Nook, it becomes possible for companies to more closely monitor people's reading habits—even when they're not surfing the Web.

...There are real dangers.

First and most obvious is the possibility that our personal data will fall into the wrong hands. Powerful data-mining tools are available not only to legitimate corporations and researchers, but also to crooks, con men and creeps. As more data about us is collected and shared online, the threats from unsanctioned interceptions of the data grow. Criminal syndicates can use purloined information about our identities to commit financial fraud, and stalkers can use locational data to track our whereabouts.

...A second danger is the possibility that personal information may be used to influence our behavior and even our thoughts in ways that are invisible to us. Personalization's evil twin is manipulation. As mathematicians and marketers refine data-mining algorithms, they gain more precise ways to predict people's behavior as well as how they'll react when they're presented with online ads and other digital stimuli. Just this past week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged that by tracking a person's messages and movements, an algorithm can accurately predict where that person will go next.

As marketing pitches and product offerings become more tightly tied to our past patterns of behavior, they become more powerful as triggers of future behavior. Already, advertisers are able to infer extremely personal details about people by monitoring their Web-browsing habits. They can then use that knowledge to create ad campaigns customized to particular individuals. A man who visits a site about obesity, for instance, may soon see a lot of promotional messages related to weight-loss treatments. A woman who does research about anxiety may be bombarded with pharmaceutical ads. The line between personalization and manipulation is a fuzzy one, but one thing is certain: We can never know if the line has been crossed if we're unaware of what companies know about us.

...privacy is "intrinsic to the concept of liberty." When we feel that we're always being watched, we begin to lose our sense of self-reliance and free will and, along with it, our individuality. "We become children," [writes computer security expert Bruce Schneier,] "fettered under watchful eyes."

Privacy is not only essential to life and liberty; it's essential to the pursuit of happiness, in the broadest and deepest sense.

Nicholas Carr
author of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"
Wall Street Journal