Google recently took another step along the path of surveillance as a service, launching what it called “interest-based advertising”, and which everyone else calls “behavioural targeting”.
These are systems that collect extensive personal data, for marketing purposes. To best understand the issues, it’s important to separate out the social ends — refining ads — from the technological means, which is massive monitoring of user activity. Too many discussions of the topic get bogged down in what’s essentially an argument of “the end justifies the means”, where a nominally beneficial goal of better advertising is presented as sufficient to trump all further implications.
Google is not the first company to get into this business. And it plans to only use information from websites that run its ads, not sensitive sources such as searches or stored messages. Still, given the number of sites that participate in its “AdSense network”, and the immense attention on the company’s conduct, arguably we’ve gone a little further down the road to hell.
Google has been taking pains to distinguish its new program from internet service provider (ISP) monitoring systems such as Phorm, which have drawn much criticism . Tim Berners-Lee has summed up the threat as: “To allow someone to snoop on your internet traffic is to allow them to put a television camera in your room, except it will tell them a whole lot more about you than the teleÂvision camera”. If Google can convince people its surveillance is merely a warm and fuzzy way of helping you shop, while ISPs’ surveillance is akin to warrantless wiretapping, that gives Google an enormous advantage in collecting information to sell to advertisers. A Business Week article bluntly stated: “Phorm could present strong competition for the ad-serving platforms purveyed by the likes of Google and Microsoft”.
As the law professor Eric Goldman commented during the controversies last year, in a post on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog: “From my perspective, the battles over the legality of Phorm and NebuAd are a smokescreen for the real issue, which is that marketers who have only server-level data don’t want to compete against someone who has a better dataset than them. So expect plenty of continued fireworks over Phorm and NebuAd, but don’t kid yourself that it’s only the Âprivacy advocates beating up on them.”
I’m continually impressed by how Google is able to influence press coverage of its initiatives, in a way many other corporate behemoths must envy. One strategy it seems to use is rather than simply issuing a boring statement, it wraps a policy announcement around a tech gimmick. The shiny part distracts the non-tech media, while the techie part captures the interest of experts. Too many supposed watchdogs end up distracted by the equivalent of a chew toy.
In this case, the smoke and mirrors devices are an “Ads Preferences Manager which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories”, labels, and browser plug-ins for opting out. While these are all laudable in the abstract, they will be irrelevant for the overwhelming majority. But to grasp how little it matters in reality, one need only be aware of the difficulties Google has in educating webmasters about using tools for basic site management. If it’s a struggle with an audience that is relatively expert and usually highly motivated to perform search engine optimisation, it won’t work well for ordinary users dealing with less urgent concerns.
In the same way that “total personalisation is total surveillance”, complete knowledge of one’s interests entails complete monitoring of one’s actions. At the very least, there should be safeguards and oversight that do not rely on the assurances of big businesses, which have every incentive to minimise any lapses or failings. No matter how benign the original intent, large collections of personal data, especially combined with the economic pressures of a deep recession or a government interest in data-mining for security purposes, are fraught with the potential for evil. – guardian.co.uk