I Spy with My Googly Eye

I found our lecture this week about privacy issues very interesting as online privacy is something that affects pretty much all of us. We all use the internet now and share information about ourselves across the web every day in the form of emails, Facebook posts, blogs and Tweets. With the realm of the digital age removing the physical barriers we uphold to the public, what is privacy anymore??-It’s not a closed door or shut curtains, it’s not a locked diary under your bed, the word ‘privacy’ means something completely different now. 

Privacy is defined by Alan Westin 2003 as “the claim of an individual to determine what information about himself or herself should be known to others” and by Burgoon et al. as ‘‘the ability to control and limit physical, interactional, psychological and informational access to the self or one’s group’’ . This is one of the problems of the law a regulation of online privacy. It is not so easily defined. 

The UK go some way to provide legislation to protect the consumer with the following bodies providing rules and regulations on the subject:

• The Data Protection Act 1998.
• Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003
• Information Commissioners' Office (ICO, 2010)
• Freedom of Information Act 2000
• Proposed: Digital Economy Bill (2009, 2010, 2011…?)

Back in 2007 The Telegraph reported on the privacy scandal that erupted around Google. It was reported that whilst taking photos for their street view maps online, Google were obtaining information from unsecured networks in local areas. Google were under investigation for breech of privacy in a number of countries, but were ‘let off’ in a good faith gesture as Google claimed the data was collected inadvertently.

Now in 2011, in an interesting move, Google have created Google Dashboard to make the information they store about you, (the Google consumer), more transparent. Google Dash board allows you to see the information that Google stores about you all in one place. It is a record of the consumer’s usage of all Google products, whether that be Gmail, YouTube, Google maps etc. The following is a video that Google have distributed to explain how this new tool will work and will probably be able to give you a better explanation than I can.

I think that it is a good thing that Google are becoming more transparent, it is important that as consumers we trust the service providers of the products we use with the information we give them. Consumers are often suspicious about the information they provide large corporations such as Google Facebook and Yahoo with, therefore, I think that is a good thing that a large corporation within the sector is taking steps towards a more open a honest approach. I think that Google have to improve their reputation for ethical data handling and this is a step towards doing that. Hopefully other conglomerates within this sector will follow their lead.

However, it doesn’t get away from the fact that Google is a free service. This means that the site is in high demands of advertisers who want space on the search engine and high listed searches, they also want the market research that Google products can provide about certain consumers. Therefore, Google are in a difficult situation as they need to make money, but they also need to provide their consumers with a trustworthy reputation. 

This is only one example of a number of internet services that collects information about consumers.

Looking at this from an advertising and marketing perspective, sites like Google are a gold mine for useful information, at a cost, and can provide ethnographic insights for which advertisers can base a campaign. Data collection via the internet is recordable and traceable, therefore, the more ‘free’ services you use the more information companies are gaining about your everyday lives.Another advantage for these ‘free’ services is that it has provided another channel for which advertisers can target consumers. 

In conclusion, even though there have been many laws that try to regulate the system to protect consumer’s privacy, I think that the internet is so vast and regularly used that it is ‘unregulateable.’(if that makes sense). Consumers have access to all of these free products but as the old saying goes “you don’t get a free lunch” and the price of a search engine may well be your privacy.