In 2004 Google unveiled Gmail: a powerful e-mail account with a gigabyte of storage. That was 500 times what Hotmail was offering—so much storage, the original Gmail didn’t even offer a delete button—and all for free.

But not everyone rejoiced. Gmail paid for all of this goodness by displaying small text ads, off to the right of each incoming message, relevant to its contents. Privacy advocates went ballistic. It didn’t seem to matter to them that a software algorithm—not a human being—was scanning your messages for keywords. The Electronic Privacy Information Center called for Gmail to be shut down, and a California state senator proposed a bill that would make it illegal to scan the contents of incoming e-mail.

Two years later a service called Futurephone let anyone make free unlimited overseas calls. You just dialed a line in Iowa and then, at the prompt, entered the number. You were never asked for your name, e-mail address or any information at all.

When I reviewed Futurephone for the New York Times, I thought I was doing my readers a favor—but it drove them crazy. They whipped themselves into a frenzy trying to figure out how Futurephone made money. Many concluded that it was an elaborate scam to harvest phone numbers.

But why, I responded on my blog, would Futurephone go to all that trouble, when there’s already a central list of American phone numbers in the phone book? All right, then, my concerned readers said, in that case, Futurephone must be listening in on our calls.

To many people, it seems that the more time we spend online, the more often we are offered convenience in exchange for our privacy. Grocery stores’ affinity cards give us discounts—but let them track what we are buying and eating. Amazon.com greets us by name and remembers what we have bought. Facebook has amassed the largest database of personal information in human history (more than half a billion people).

Of course, convenience-for-privacy deals have been going on for years. Credit cards leave a trail. Phones give phone company employees a record of who you’ve been calling. It’s nice to have a house to live in—but buying one leaves a permanent record of your whereabouts.

There are some good reasons to protect certain aspects of our privacy, of course. We would never want our medical or financial details to keep us from getting a job—or a date. We might not want our sexual exploits or our voting patterns made public.

But beyond those obvious exceptions, privacy fears have always been more of an emotional reaction than a rational one. (Does anyone really care what groceries you buy? Does it matter if they do?) And in the online world, much of it is simply fear of the unknown, of what’s new.
In time, as the unknown becomes familiar, each new wave of online-privacy terror seems to fade away. Nobody bats an eye over Gmail’s ad-scanning feature anymore. Even middle-agers and grandparents are signing up for Facebook.

(And Futurephone? It’s out of business. Blogger sleuths uncovered its more likely business model: it was exploiting a government subsidy that pays Iowa a few cents per incoming long-distance call. Iowa was sharing the revenue with Futurephone.)

The younger generation can’t even comprehend why their elders worry about privacy. Indeed, the entire appeal of the new age of online services is to broadcast personal information. On purpose. Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places even publicize your current location, so that your friends can track your movements (and, of course, join you).

If you were among those who thought that Google overstepped privacy lines with Gmail, you must be positively freaked about these developments. For all we know, Google is collecting data about what we watch (Google TV), where we go (Google Maps), whom we call (Android phones), what we say (Google Buzz), and what we do online (Google Chrome browser).

5 Comments

1. 1. Yummy Tree Sap 03:31 PM 12/24/10

   I don't like the logic behind a lot of what is said in this editorial. Most of it seems to fall under the "Well, a lot of things aren't very private so it's perfectly OK on the Internet too" train of thought, which I'm not fond of in the least bit. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to not want details of my life, be it shopping habits or Web sites visited or what have you—no matter how inconsequential—disclosed to anyone if I don't want it to be disclosed. The fact that non-Internet services do the same thing does not make it any less comforting. I hate to be a purveyor of clichés, but you all know the one about what two wrongs do not make.
   
   I will agree that there is also a large amount of overreaction, and the computer algorithms of Gmail's ad service is a great example. This I am totally fine with.
   
   It just seems to me that Internet privacy is not something that should be brushed aside with statements like "It's not like the information is important anyway." In our current age of social networking, I feel like Internet privacy should be inspected more closely, if anything.
   
   Even if most Facebook users do indeed seem to willfully broadcast everything about their lives, and if they're doing that they're bringing any potential consequences upon themselves, that doesn't make it totally acceptable. Some people do not fully comprehend the Web. They understand what it is, but maybe not its vastness. Something like that. You can make an argument that it's not (as an example) Facebook's fault that the average user may not fully understand what they're doing, but I disagree. If they're providing a service to the uneducated masses, they should drive home the importance of being smart on the Internet. E.g., if your profile is public and you post something, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD CAN SEE IT. I can guarantee you that this isn't something the average Facebook user thinks when he or she posts that she's going to be at Starbucks at 7:00 PM tonight, or gives out his or her phone number on a friend's wall or something like that. They see themselves as being in this online bubble, so to speak, and it is very much untrue.
   
   And there are a few other things Facebook has done that even a jaded Internet user such as myself finds questionable, but I won't get into that.
   
   Despite a lot of the concerns over Internet privacy being sensationalist and misinformed, there still are legitimate problems that I think must be re-examined.

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2. 2. DennisJ 05:35 PM 12/28/10

   I find the article on privacy rather simplistic and naïve. Here in the UK there have been numerous cases where putting too much information into the public domain has had negative effects. As examples
   1. Use of Google Earth images to target old churches with lead roofs which are stripped of their sheet lead at night for sale for its scrap value.
   2. Google streetview used by thieves to target houses for burglary (often in towns well away from the thieves’ home territory but with good access to major roads for a quick getaway).
   3. People losing their jobs because of posting negative comments on Facebook about their employer.
   4. Employers searching Facebook for background information about candidates prior to job interviews.
   5. Police now regularly use Facebook in criminal investigations to find links between offenders (probably a useful side effect!).
   6. Use of Facebook to find family information to determine date of birth, mothers' maiden names for identity theft.
   7. Use of Twitter data to show when someone is away from home to assist burglary.
   
   There are numerous other examples where the innovative use of publicly available information can be damaging for the individual.
   

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3. 3. persimmon 02:25 PM 1/17/11

   This article is really simplistic. In less than a year of subscribing, I've learned to take SA articles with a grain of salt. These one pagers pick and choose information and then lump them together to make blanket statements.

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4. 4. vazix 12:04 PM 1/26/11

   This article was based more on world wide conspiracy theories than on who really needs very private information to thief money. Like Dennis stated earlier, thieves can monitor the presence of house owners. But there are young children out in the internet that can be very easily fooled by adults who present themselves as young teenagers and with that much private data already waiting to be used, they can very efficiently become "friends", and extract money. Like saying they need help and so on.

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5. 5. Circle2012 03:06 AM 5/21/12

   Facebook cooperates with intelligence services in the US. One of the investors is from Russia and there was a report in a German TV channel, Phoenix, saying that there are rumours this investor has established contacts to the russian secret service years ago. Social networking services revolutionize marketing, because you can check if personal profiles are up-to-date. Traditional marketing campaigns often lacked in up-to date profiles. Who believes that Facebook just earns money with advertisment and games? Profiles are the profit of companies like google and facebook worldwide. I mean it would be fair, if they pay people for posting information about themselves. All the rest is George Orwell, 1984. Capitalism kills democracy.

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