Most people do not realize that, every second of the day, social networks like Facebook or search engines like Google are accumulating a lot of data about us. What they do or can do with this data is an issue that has increasingly become essential to discuss – and it’s central theme or background to most of the workshops and lectures in WWW 2013.
A recent article in The Guardian addresses this point. “In theory, most browsers and website allow you to permanently opt out of online behavioral advertising, but they don’t actually prevent tracking. In fact, the current rules allow websites to decide what to do with information. Much of this may change if the World Wide Web Consortium comes up with amenable rules, but for now, activists and database marketers have yet to find common ground. As Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford privacy researcher, told CNN: “The advertisers have been extraordinarily obstructionist, raising the same issues over and over again, forcing new issues that were not on the agenda, adding new issues that have been closed, and launching personal attacks.” “, wrote Pratap Chatterjee.
Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), recently coined the word “cyberazzi” to describe data companies that trawl the internet for information on consumers. Like paparazzi who stake out restaurants in Hollywood, and who snap pictures of celebrities in indiscreet situations, the cyberazzi stake out your web browsers and mobile phones to quietly harvest data on what you like, where you go and what kind of questions you ask.
In this blog post, Mark van Rijmenam advocates four principles that organisations should adopt in order to protect consumers’ privacy:
1. Radical transparency – inform customers about the data you collect and what you do with it. Provide a paid service if the consumer does not want to share their data in the free version;
2. Simplicity by design – keep it simple and understandable for consumers;
3. Secure your data – define the data you really need to do business and keep it as secure as possible;
4. Privacy by design – make privacy part of the DNA of the organisation.
In the video bellow, the specialist Rick Smolan discusses the power and the risks associated with big data. “From phone records to credit card transactions and pacemakers to browser history, in a world where everything we do creates data, new questions and issues surrounding ownership and privacy are looming conversations”, Smolan says.
In another video, produced by O’reilly Media, Terence Craig and Mary Ludloff, authors of Privacy and Big Data, ask and answer this question: What level of privacy do you really have in the age of big data?
And in this article, the journalist David Meyer defends an idea that will certainly be discussed on the WWW: the collision of big data and privacy requires a new realpolitik for internet. “As these datasets have valid uses, this is yet another reason why we need better regulation”, explains Meyer.
Be attentive to this sensitive theme during the WWW Conference.
