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The Internet's Privacy Grab

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 27, 2009

Where the Internet has taken us in such a short time is astonishing, and where it might take us is unsettling to anyone concerned about protecting both personal privacy and intellectual creations.

The best company at turning the ocean of Internet data into useful facts has been Google, which began as a search engine and grew into a company that has its electronic eyes on just about everything, including your house.

To find someone, type in their address and Google gives you a map. To see the neighborhood from the air, click the satellite view. To see the house from the curb, use Google's Streetview. You'll see the house and maybe even yourself, if you were in the yard when the Google photographer came around.

Child-advocacy groups are understandably concerned. A predator with an Internet connection could scout for homes with swing sets and other toys in the backyard.

But it's all free and perfectly legal. Google makes its money from selling ads based on the huge volume of traffic its innovations generate.

And innovations keep coming.

The company is constantly improving its search engine. It can now recognize what you're looking for, even if your Google search is using inexact words. And it can tailor advertisements to fit your preferences, based on Google's record of your Internet behavior.
Google is scanning in every book that doesn't have a copyright and providing excerpts from many that do.

It offers a service called Latitude that will identify your location on a map by tracking your cell phone signal. Unlike Streetview, this is an opt-in service. A group of friends, for example, could give Google permission to share their current whereabouts. It is, of course, information you'd never want the criminal world to see.

But it is information that could be useful to a business. If you're often in the vicinity, it might want to target you with an ad.

And if it makes economic sense to track personal journeys and post pictures of every house and vacant lot, it's hard to imagine what might be next. A search engine could combine all sorts of public records with addresses, and then put them all on a map.

Conceivably, you could take a virtual stroll down a street and see houses marked with their appraised values, owner's occupation, annual salary for government workers, birthdays, criminal record, mug shots if they've been arrested, and probably much more.

Clerks of court in Florida are right to shield some personal information from their electronic files, which helps protect privacy and reduce possibilities of identity theft.

Cyber criminals are increasingly busy. Attempts to access sensitive government information increased 40 percent last year, USA Today reports. Someone makes a serious attempt to steal secret government data 15 times a day. We don't know how many times they succeed.

The changes caused by the unprecedented networking, data mining and advertising go beyond simple issues of privacy.

"Google devalues everything it touches," said Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, in a recent discussion on the future of newspapers. "Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively."

In Google's world, everything has the same value: free.

And it has worked well for Google, whose total stock value exceeds the worth of General Motors, General Mills, Ford, U.S. Steel, The New York Times, Time Warner, Caterpillar, CSX railroad and Con Agra - combined.

Google, and companies like it, have become major players in our personal and business lives. They're keeping a close eye on us. We should keep a close eye on them.

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