Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Google has a new privacy policy. Should you be worried?
I wrote this column sitting in airports and cafés. My large screen has been scrutinised repeatedly during this time. Somebody even asked me if they could use my laptop to charge their phone. People on the tables next to me stole casual glances at the tabs open in my browser,registering the searches I was making,videos I was watching and people I was chatting with. Ironically,I was writing about privacy.
Last month when Google,the internet megalith,announced that it is going to implement a fair and transparent privacy policy across the Google universe,the terms of debate shifted. Rather than who reads our data,or where it will travel,Google offered to consolidate all our private data into one centralised system. In this system,the concern was not about our data talking to any other external entities at least not any more than it already does when you use a Google based service,browser or platform but in your distributed private data interacting with each other,and facilitating conversations,which will build a unique individual profile,thus enabling more user-sensitive information to be delivered to us within the Google network. Or in other words,the anxiety with this shift in Googles privacy policy is about how,if somebody looked into just one of my screens,or public avatars,they would automatically see everything else that might not belong to that space or moment.
Let me flesh it out with an example. In the earlier days,if you created different accounts for different Google services,you signed Terms of Service agreements. Even though most of us would just click the accept button,without reading the fine print in that contract,it protected us against abuse or misuse from Google. That Terms of Service was a platform or service-specific contractual agreement,which could help a customer claim certain rights to privacy,safety,anonymity etc. Each particular instance was a different space of negotiation,where differently worded and implemented policies governed our actions within that particular space. So this assuaged our anxiety about what this private company could do with our data and more importantly who else would be able to access this data. Such a distributed privacy regime was specially useful because it allowed you to create silos of your private data so that what you saw on YouTube was not available to your Orkut or Google Plus networks. The information that you searched for was not a part of the profile your colleagues could access. You had the space to create multiple identities for yourself,clearly compartmentalising things that you wanted to share,show and hide.
In this new consolidated privacy regime,we now have a Facebook-like condition where everything that you do,is now mapped onto one user name or one identity and you have to be more pro-active in filtering and sharing information with your different contacts in the Google world. The onus of protecting privacy is now on the user and it exploits the fact that most users have an innate faith in the idea that the platforms that they occupy online will keep them safe. This faith gets augmented when it comes to companies like Google who have taken great public pains to paint themselves as heroic warriors against authoritarian states and companies asking for invasive information practices. This service will offer more sensitive location-based,network-based,taste-based results,as algorithms constantly produce profiles of your information practices. However,we must remember that this profile is not available for us to edit.
This is the main worry about Googles change in privacy policy. They will consolidate not only all the content we access,but when we did it,how we did it,what brought it to us,what we did next,what our friends are doing,what are the other websites outside of Google that we are accessing,and what are the patterns in our information access. We can no longer be different people in different places online. And that profile building is something that is out of our control. Who accesses it and what they can read of it is also out of our control. The next time you are logged in to your Google account,remember that what you do is going to be mapped on to what other people think you are. And you need to figure out how comfortable you are going to be,knowing that your colleagues know what you did with your family,your boss knowing your internet searches,or your children knowing what you were downloading last night.
digitalnativeexpressindia.com
Nishant Shah is director ,research,Centre for Internet and Society
