The Privacy Horse Has Left the Barn

Google’s new privacy policy takes effect today, and the way I understand it, Google will now combine information gleaned from the users of its products into coherent profiles. These are to be used to create better targets for advertisers – and make Google more money. Allegedly, Google isn’t interested in collecting the info on the user as a person, only as an advertising target.

I typically take offense at companies like these imposing changes on users without their consent, where the only escape is to disconnect from the service. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sworn up and down that I would pull the plug on Facebook, as an example. But these services are provided for free – meaning, they don’t charge us money, but they collect information on us.

We Americans have libertarian (with a small L) instincts in our DNA. We think we’re in control of stuff that we don’t control at all. Most of us like capitalism (with a little C), whereby we can start with nothing and become zillionaires through imagination, gumption, persistence and fair play (at least in theory). But God deliver any entity that charges us for something we’ve been accustomed to getting for “free.”

As one commentator put it today, we users of services like Google and Facebook think we’re the consumers, but actually, we’re just the product that these services make available to advertisers. As the services improve what they sell to advertisers, we pay a higher and higher price in the form of incremental losses in privacy. It might be more straightforward if Google would calculate how much it costs for us to use the service and give us an option between surrender and pulling the plug: paying cash in return for not creating our profiles. But so far, that’s not a choice we have.

The real problem is that we can’t have all this modern connectedness and privacy at the same time – they’re virtually antithetical concepts now. If we want real privacy, we can stay off the Internet, turn off our smart phones and move to the most sparsely populated county in Idaho. Oh, and we can’t forget to cut up all those credit and debit cards. It would also help if we gave up our driver’s licenses and stopped voting. In the measure that we withdraw from the world, we reduce our exposure to exploitation, the same way minimizing face-to-face contact with others protects us from contagious disease.

But as I’ve often said, the privacy horse – with us on it -- left the barn long ago. The most we can do right now is keep track of where it’s going, and if we don’t like it, dismount.