Privacy

It’s no news that major corporations are pushing hard to develop a positive image using social networking channels — see the McDonald’s Quality Correspondence Campaign or the backfired Wal-Mart blogging foray — and neither is it news that companies aren’t afraid to use legal recourse to protect their interests… Napster, anyone? But an interesting article about a VW Subpoena to YouTube that appeared in Wired this morning shows a different mix of the two forces: a company taking legal action to protect its copyrighted material, which just so happens to be a piece of negative PR.

Basically, the video in contention is a spoof of a recent VW Golf commercial with some rather unflattering Nazi-themed overtones. Volkswagen filed a subpoena and is now looking to get the user’s identity from YouTube, who complies with the law but alerts users of the filing to give them a chance to respond. While this sort of thing is almost a daily occurrence with file-sharing networks, legal action with social media sites is a relatively new beast, and Wired wonders how dedicated social media sites will be to protecting the identities of their users as more cases like this appear.

As I touched on a couple of weeks ago, the web has a funny way of making temporal comments permanent, and biting those who post things against their better judgment. With major companies taking assertive (and certainly not unreasonable) motions to protect their copyright (and brand), users should really be aware that they’re playing in the real world when they post anything online. At the same time, social media sharing sites should do their best to protect their users — within limits — from themselves.

An interesting article appeared in the New York Times last week concerning people who appeared in news stories that were wrong or incomplete coming back to haunt them later in life. The story points out the stories of several people for whom articles with inaccuracies appear at the top of Google — things like mismatched credentials, charges that were dropped later, stories phrased from one point of view without a counterpoint. While in the offline world these articles are long buried in stocks of microfilm no one will care to review, the supreme authority of nytimes.com keeps them at the top of Google ad infinitum.

It’s a very particular problem and I applaud the Times for taking it on, though the solution to the problem is a rather muddy one. Who’s to blame — SEO or Google? To what extent is an entity responsible for removing articles that may be inaccurate? And who polices all this information?

Of course, this is just one example of the bigger issue of what people can find about you on the ‘net determining the outcome of your job opportunities, reputation, and even criminal record — what with Facebook commonly scrutinized by job recruiters, MySpace pictures leading to criminal charges and the possibly damning result of Googling: “Insert your name here.” To some extent, this is the same question posed by the controversy around Google street view — how much privacy can you reasonably expect in our technology heavy times?

The glaring obvious answer is, of course, don’t say anything stupid on the internet, but it’s a fairly insufficient one. After all, while you may hope that no one sees comment #143 on an obscure message board or blog out there in cyberspace, the New York Times brings an inherent trust that is good enough for Google, and good enough for the person checking out your good name.

Chances are, even if you’re not a regular blogosphere reader you heard about the recent scathing privacy review given to Google in a report issued by Privacy International.  The report evaluated 24 of the most popular web companies — from Amazon and Apple to Skype, LinkedIn and Google — and gave Google alone the crushing rating of “Comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy.”  Summarizing the several indictments against Google (including a vague privacy policy and foggy fate of collected data) is the bold statement of Google’s “track history of ignoring privacy concerns.  Every corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance.”

Though this study states it was conducted over a six-month period, we can only infer that the latter statement is inspired by the recent launch of Google Street View, a new service offering street-level views of San Francisco, New York, Denver, Las Vegas and Miami, which has lead to a vocal outcry from the blogosphere and more than a smattering of sites dedicated to finding compromising photos on the service.  Even otherwise internetphiles find the service kind of scary.

Google, of course, was prompt to retort the condemning report, with Matt Cutts  citing how Google held information from the US DOJ and will anonymize search logs after 18-24 months (and shortly afterwards, reduced that period to just 18 months).  He also critiques the wanton selling of browsing history by ISPs to third parties,  an equally unsettling issue handled completely outside the report.

While I certainly agree that Google received a possibly unearned damnation, the reality is that while their privacy record may not be that bad, it’s not that good either.  Even if you’re motto is “Don’t be evil,” you can do a whole lot without intending it, and tracking the search results of millions upon millions of searches, scanning emails for relevant content to advertise, and aggregating in-depth information of physical geography and making it available to the world does open up a whole lot of potentialities that need to be considered very carefully.

Rather than pinning all the blame on Google, I think what this report points to is the need to have a national dialogue about these issues and reach an understanding, be it legal or cultural, about what expectations there are of both producers/users in the Web 2.0 world and the companies that make this world happen.  We are living in an increasingly transparent planet, interconnected and quantifiable from your Blackberry to your credit card, and Google is not alone in its share of blame for the iffy privacy situation resulting from all of it.  What we need, more than deflecting blame, is a comprehensive movement to confront the idea of privacy in the 21st century.