Why Web 2.0 Will End Your Privacy 233
An anonymous reader writes "This is a pretty good insight into some of the dangers of social networking and website customisation -- marketing and loss of privacy. When marketeers know who your friends are and what you are all into, it makes their advertising a lot more effective. From the article: "Why are the companies worth so much money? Why is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars without a proper revenue model? Why is Digg allegedly pitched at over $20m (at the last count) without any idea of where money is going to be pulled from? The answer is - data. Information. Marketing. Every detail about you and me. That is where the money is."
IANAJ, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a journalist, but how do these guys get their credentials? Wil forwards an interesting thesis about the advent of loss of privacy as more people jump on the internet, but he forwards this under the aegis of Web 2.0.
Give Wil credit, he actually tries to define Web 2.0, but it's probably the 10th definition I've seen. (For the record, my definition more typically aligns with the advent of more desktop-like and agile web/browser applications that start to look and feel like desktop.)
However, I don't see the increased loss of privacy correlated much at all to Web 2.0, unless you just consider that, over time, people have less privacy, and that, over time, Web 2.0 continues to evolve (whatever that means). For example, Wil cites: "The one thing the Web 2.0 sites have in common is that they are furiously mining information about you and your buddies. What you like." Again, this has little to do with Web 2.0. That "Web 2.0" is the current buzzword is the only relationship to increased data-mining. Data-mining has been available, happening, and increasing in the internet domain for years.
I think privacy has changed and evolved as a result of increased communications networks... Web 2.0 has little to do with that and is only a small part of it. As databases get larger, networks get faster, data-mining gets smarter, computer processors get faster, an end result is there is more data than ever about more people than ever in more places than ever.
Whether that results in loss of privacy is an interesting debate, but in my opinion not an assumption/axiom. For example, the more data out there, the more it becomes environmental noise. Interesting perhaps at first, and maybe for longer to specially interested parties, but something we will adapt to. (As an aside, I do think there's a learning curve for young people and their interaction on sites like MySpace, they need to learn not to put voluntarily so much personal information out there as to make themselves vulnerable to predators, a lesson I think they're learning.
Another result I find useful is that I get much more directly targeted advertising than ever before. It's nice now, no more tampax fliers in my mailbox, but it's handy to know Staples has a new SD 1G card available for my camera at less than $100.
How much of it is *real* data? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that myspace is a cesspool, but everyone my age has one. I'll give you a hint: They aren't in their mid thirties earning 250k+ a year.
No matter how much data you have, if it isn't true it;s worthless.
that's easy (Score:5, Insightful)
> is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars
> without a proper revenue model?
Because nobody learned a damn thing from the dot-bomb.
And this is bad because... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as I'm going to be inundated with advertising, I see no reason to complain if it is at least advertising for stuff I actually care about. [shrug]
Creating fake people? (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, they might write a blog as a 75-year-old goth who's into snowboarding and hip hop. Or as a 13-year-old girl who likes shuffleboard and orthopaedic shoe inserts. If done enough, it's possible that such profiles could significantly skew the data obtained from such sites. Marketing towards people who don't exist isn't exactly of much benefit.
Enough with the web 2.0 nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet doesn't have a version number, get over it people.
what's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have no problem with effective, targeted marketing. Actually, I prefer it to ineffective, non-targeted marketing. I'm really into foosball, I'd rather see adds for foosball related stuff than for products I have absolutely no interest in.
That said, what I do have a problem is invasive or disruptive marketing. Stuff that fills up my inbox. Stuff that obscures webpages I'm trying to view, and forces me to find a miniscule "X" in order to close the advertisement. You get the picture.
The thesis is wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
The thesis that advertising becomes "more effective" is without evidence. Advertisers might hope it is more effective, but historically, it's only proven to be more annoying (both by being more plentiful, and by making hopelessly silly demographic conclusions). I'm guessing that this sort of targeted advertising will go over like Jalapeno-flavored toilet paper.
Just destroy advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's wrong to attach this issue exclusively to the technology called Web 2.0; whatever that term really means anyway - but that's another rant.
The picture is much broader than that, the assault on our privacy is being conducted on many fronts and motivated by the same desire: To waste less money on marketing.
Someone once said: "I know I'm wasting half my money on advertising. The problem is that I don't know which half that is"
The Internet, it seems, is providing a solution to this conundrum. Suddenly, advertisers have the ability to only pay for advertising only when someone responds the advertising. This makes such adverts far more valuable than something that isn't interactive like a billboard or TV advertisement.
But this is just the beginning. In the next few years, we will see the development of schemes where you pay for advertising only when you make a direct sale off the back of it. The scheme will track you from the moment you click, to the moment you get the confirmation e-mail. The problem with this is that in order to audit it properly you need to link that click through to a real person. And there-in lies the privacy problem.
The solution to this problem is fairly easy: Just block all the advertising. People, like the owners of Slashdot might decry this solution because sites such as theirs might not be able to survive without this revenue. I put my money where my mouth was. I like Slashdot so I paid for it directly.Imagine how much higher the standard of Slashdot would be if all it's revenues came from subscribes. Suddenly, quality matters much more than page views. Remember, it took Digg to motivate Slashdot to change, because its cash cow was the advertsing and Digg was starting to threaten that. If we took out this source of revenue, the quality of the web would surely increase.
Only the people who make lucid enough points to attract paying subscribers would be able to sustain a high traffic site. As a result, natural selection would weed out the trash and reward the good. A future without advertising is a future where the user comes first.
Simon.
Advertising != Evil, Just Bad Advertising Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, am really looking forward to "better" advertising. Advertising isn't a bad thing, it can be an informative help to find the projects/services I'm looking for. It's shitty advertising that just fires shotgun marketing in the dark hoping for a hit that sucks. I've actually clicked on a number of Google advertisements when searching for products/services, because they were relevant to what I was looking for and I wanted more information.
It's the huge pop-over, pop-under, flashy, sound making (grraah!) advertisements trying to sell a 24 year old college student home owners insurance or pull me into a pyramid scheme that are the bane of internet existance. (yes, I use firefox, flashblock, etc to lower my exposure, but still.)
If the information that I have voluntarily made public on social networks leads to advertisements for things that I'm actually interested in or even actively searching, I'm all for it. As long as I'm making all the information public myself, I'm not involuntarily losing any privacy either.
It's kind of a bummer, I think, that all the horrible advertising through time has created so many people that just knee-jerk hate the stuff. Maybe in time with relevent advertisements they could turn that around so that they seem useful instead of annoying.
Re:Advertising != Evil, Just Bad Advertising Sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying that "social networking will end privacy" is just misleading. Other people (advertisers, bosses, relatives, whatever) knowing things about the things you do in public is normal and expected, this privacy degredation is a red herring.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's good to be behind the times? (Score:4, Insightful)
All joking aside, I also don't "get" the social networking sites, and I avoid them. My blog is sufficient for my friends and family and follow my various goings-on. At the risk of sounding like a snob, I guess I don't see the point of hanging out in chat rooms and social networking sites when there's a ton of people all over the place you could be actually meeting and hanging out with. Then again, I met my wife through the personals, mostly because I rarely find the kind of women I'm interested in at your typical thirtysomething watering hole. I suppose in the end people want a safe and largely anonymous way to say, "hey, here's who I am," and hope to God that people like them. Dunno. I smell a senior thesis in all of this somewhere.
Help! (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps why MySpace is worth half a billion dollars without any proper revenue model is because... oh lets be radical here.. perhaps because it's ALL HYPE?
The problem is there is lots of room for advertisers to throw their money away and a lot of companies have been catching onto that for the past ~5 years.
The problem with MySpace as their gleaming example is they'd somehow need to be able to re-coup $100 USD from every member (assuming there are ~5 million of them) via advertising, subscribed services etc. I see this as highly doubtful, and looking at examples only 6 or 7 years ago of businesses apparently worth in the range of 10 to 500 million of dollars, but with those estimations based entirely on hype, bullshit, naivety, or just an all-out view to make a quick buck while the newcomers are still gullable.
Tell me when MySpace has a real business model that doesn't rely on click-happy 13 year olds or balding 40 year paedophiles who want to win an Xbox.
The answer is "wrong question"... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you buy a bottle of milk in a supermarket, you diminish your privacy by letting the retailer know, that you need a bottle of milk. When you hire a maid to clean up your flat, you let her know a lot about your dirty laundry (literally and otherwise). And when you buy a book at a bookstore (or a video), the proprietor could offer you another one on your next visit (like Amazon does).
That's how it all begins — computers, WEB-2.0, and other technological advances simply enable us to trade even more privacy for convenience.
When the choice is volunteer, that's perfectly Ok. At least, MySpace and others don't force you to reveal your real name on the site. If the solicitations get too much, all you need is to do is close the account. Government-imposed things, however, are much worse. EZ-Pass — increasingly mandated at toll plazas — is not anonymous at all.
Sadly, nobody seems to care... The worst a marketeer can do to you is spam. Government has much bigger abuse potential.
Good advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps there might be a problem when advertisers start targeting me for Viagra, or some other product for some embarrassing condition I have. But as many others have pointed out, social networking is built upon user-contributed data. So if I don't want to tell people I have ED, I don't see how the advertisers would be able to figure it out. If they went and got my address from my doctor, then I would be concerned.
Re:No loss of my privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How much of it is *real* data? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that myspace is a cesspool, but everyone my age has one. I'll give you a hint: They aren't in their mid thirties earning 250k+ a year.
No matter how much data you have, if it isn't true it;s worthless.
You seem to be stuck in some type of positivist thinking (at least you're not capitalizing the word 'true'); and possibly not all that familiar, actually, with data mining techniques. It would, perhaps, be a better statement to say that 'No matter how much data you have, if it isn't precise, it's worthless.' Precise, inaccurate, skewed data can reveal all sorts of patterns and relationships. Take, for instance, a scale that measures weight which is off by 10lbs. The data it tells you is not 'true', but you can certainly use it to measure if you've gained or lost weight.
Similarly, it doesn't matter at all if people use fake names, fake addresses, or whatever. If teenagers consistently enter in fake data to these websites after midnight, while 30 somethings enter fake data during working hours, you can quite reasonably conclude that the teenager demographic has different sleeping patterns than the 30 something crowd.
And lets not forget all of the statistical and mathematical tools you can use to filter out noise. From chi-square tests and standard deviations to fourier transforms and gaussian analysis... there are an endless supply of tools to filter out noise. (interesting philosophical question: is 'noise' considered true or false?)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Creating fake people? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is effective advertising even bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
He and I are both car junkies so he had a clever response. "If, when you saw ads, they were things like new products for your specific car, would you be as mad at them? I mean, if someone makes a new 9lb flywheel for your engine, and we show you that ad, will it be upsetting?"
I had to concede - no. I currently spend my time trying to find what I want when it comes to go-fast parts for my cars.
If I only ever saw ads for performance car parts for cars that I own, deals on new anime releases, and accessories for canon EOS cameras, i'd probably really enjoy advertising.
My naive hope is that eventually, spam-style ads will go away due to market forces. People with legitimate products will understand that more effective ad techniques exist, and shit-peddlers will be marginalized, much luck the current crop of spammers have been.
Re:And this is bad because... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, why put up with being manipulated, much less be more readily accepting of ads targetting specifically to push your buttons?
I don't want advertisers knowing me. Social networking, Bayesian analysis, and other data mining techniques for sifting through large amounts of seemingly unrelated data can turn up interesting and often deceptive correlations. What buying habits and behavioral do you have that are shared with criminals, with people having marriage troubles, or with people that have embarrassing diseases? Do any of your habits suggest a political affiliation that the government in power may disagree with? Do you think that there are never false positives or mistakes? Do you really want other people who have profit as their only connection to you to know and sell information about your life to other interested parties?
(Aren't the credit reporting agencies bad enough?)
Re:IANAJ, but (Score:4, Insightful)
And Amen to that - also, I wish this kind of selectiveness could be applied to TV. It might even assuage any eventual non-skipability of ads in mainstream players, something which makes me grind my teeth. If advertisers could show me one thirty second ad that actually interested me every, oh 15 mins or so, instead of shotgun-blasting me with Hair, Perfume, Nappy, Toilet Roll, Personal Finance, Cars, Personal Finance, Hair, Insurance, Personal Finance........... and instead hit me with ads for computer parts, movies, techie magazines, websites, jobs sites, games, furniture, design magazines, TVs and gadgets (and if it has to be personal grooming, at least make it male stuff).
No more Shiela's Wwheels [sheilaswheels.com] ads for this male, 23, non-driver.
They'd get me watching a lot more TV, they'd probably sell me more stuff (meh) in the long run, and everyone'd be happier (kinda).
An added feature might be the ability to add your penis size and how long you can maintain an erecion to your personal profile. That'd save the spam companies a fuckload of bandwidth, and keep my inbox near empty.
Re:IANAJ, but (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an interesting insight. The point of collecting and selling the information is that the information is tied to *you*, the person who uses websites that sell the data about your preferences. If you're saying that more data about you contributes to noise, I don't see how that's possible unless you choose to lie about your preferences or add spurious, false data by pretending to be interested in things, for example. In other words, where does the "noise" come from? Records of your clicks, URLs visited, friends added, etc. is not noise. It's data that indicates something about your behavior.
If, OTOH, you're suggesting that, as more data is collected about more people, the collection of data itself becomes noisy because the data set is large, well, that's just a question of data processing, and doesn't seem to pose a challenge for current and near-term tech. The records still connect behaviors with identities.
Seems to me the best way to avoid being catalogued is to use fake names, and many of them, so that there is no single personal identity that represents your behavior. I understand that a resourceful data collector can try to associate your IP address [or your Trusted Computing-equipped tattletale computer] with your identity -- I think THIS is the area we should focus our attention upon, if privacy is important to us.
After all, if all your various identities can be associated with the same computer, IP address, or physical location in meatspace, then none of that data is noise. It's all relevant to you and your behavior.
Re:How much of it is *real* data? (Score:3, Insightful)
What they enter in their details is *worthless* compared to things like "A high percentage of people in this social network clicked on this ad, so let's show this ad to the other people in this network more often". It's not the user-entered data, it's _how you use the system_ while you're logged in.
Think about things like my.yahoo.com, and google's "Personalized Home". If you're using these features, then google and yahoo can associate *every* search you make with you, the person. If you use their email services, that's even more data on you. That's a hell of a lot of data. I know if you look at my yahoo mailbox, you can figure out where I live, work, who I associate with... My google search history actually details all that and more, since I've google mapped routes from home and work to dozens of places.
They watch what you do, not what you say.
Re:The thesis is wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
The hope is that targetted advertising can increase the ratio between sales versus advertising costs. There's also an unfounded notion that it will also increase overall sales (putting an ad at on a bus stop will induce more commuters to buy than if the same people saw the same ad on TV or in a magazine).
Really what they are getting trying to do is to lower the signal-to-noise ratio of advertisement with the hope that you will get out of the habit of tuning out advertising. That's not likely to work unless the total amount of advertising decreases substantially -- fat chance of that.
Re:It's good to be behind the times? (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends who you are. I'm on Facebook, because lots of my friends are on Facebook. These are people who I went to university with but are now spread out all over the UK and beyond - I do not have the ability to meet and hang out with them whenever I want. My website is indeed sufficient for my friends and family to follow my goings-on, but I want to know what they think and see what they're doing and tell them what I think about what they're getting up to.
But on the other hand, I do enjoy going out and meeting and "hanging out", as you youngsters say, with friends I DO still leave near. Like all things, social networking sites are part of a balanced diet.
Re:How much of it is *real* data? (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you know they are 13? The data is fake. What if you stood on the scale and some days it was out anywhere between 5 and 20 pounds? Unless you work to assumption that they are consistent in their fake data entry. Also this isn't person data, it's demographic data which is already available through many more sources than the web.
The suggestion that noise can be filtered out is all well and good. But in order to do that you have to define what noise is, and in doing so there is a suggestion that you already know to a degree what you are looking for (so you can exclude what you are not looking for). If you are altering your base data to suit what you want to see then you are skewing your own results.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's true, but I think there is a misconception (especially among kids and young adults) that when they change their mind, they can just take it offline. Close their account and all traces are gone. They don't realize it's all being saved perpetually.