Online privacy? It’s a using game

You have no doubt read by now about Facebook’s ham-fisted attempt to smear Google on the basis the latter fails to respect its users’ privacy. If you have not, I suggest looking it up on some internet search engine or other (I’m sure there’s one out there, I just can’t recall its name).

There’s certainly been a lot written about it.

Facebook’s assertion -- leaked by complicit PR types – is that Google collects secret dossiers of information about its users’ online activities, which it wants to use for some unspecified commercial advantage. The accusation is particularly aimed at “Social Circles”, a Google social-networking service that may represent a competitive threat to Facebook if only anyone had ever heard of it.

Naturally, Facebook had to nip it in the oh-so-obscure bud.

If you’ve read about the fallout elsewhere, you’ll have read others pointing out the irony of Facebook claiming to defend users’ online privacy – an irony it must have also noticed, which would explain the attempt at anonymity. I won’t bother.

My point is this: it’s true. In fact, it’s so blindingly obviously true it’s a wonder even Facebook felt the need to point it out. Google does respect your privacy, of course, but it does so grudgingly, and only to the extent it is required to by law or legal settlements. If Google had its way, I would be able to look you up on the web and, within seconds, know where you live, where you work, anything noteworthy you’ve done recently and more. In its wildest fantasies it supposes I could have satellite and street-level images of your home to look at, with just a few clicks.

Hey, wait a tick ...

As to the assertion that Google collects private information about your activities for its own commercial gain – well, duh. That’s why you get ads on your Gmail page eerily relevant to the content of your messages.

It’s also why you get strangely (sometimes bizarrely) relevant ads on the side of your Facebook profile page – because Facebook does it, too.

Neither company makes much income from users buying their services. They make their money by selling advertisers access to their users and they do that by knowing as much about you as possible. That’s the business model – I’m

not telling you anything you don’t know but Facebook apparently 

reckons you haven’t sussed it yet.

If Facebook and Google (and Microsoft, Apple and so on and so forth down the line) had their ways, privacy would be a thing of the past. They believe (and truly, they do) that people’s archaic wish to hold on to their privacy is a barrier to the achievement of their greatest desires.

These companies believe that giving them access to as much information about you and what you do and who you know and how you know them and what you do with them is to your benefit. And

if you benefit, they benefit, and everyone’s happy and some of them are rich.

That’s the theory.

And, hey, they’re probably right. There’s a generation of kids who think sending each other mobile phone pictures of what my generation used to call their “private parts” is no big deal (I have no idea what the young people these days call them, because I’m old and curmudgeonly). They’re all connected on at least one or two different online social networks, and they’ll “friend” anyone who asks and they place absolutely no value whatsoever on keeping any thought that pops into their heads to themselves. These kids (or maybe the generation after them) will grow up wondering what this whole “privacy” hoo-ha ever was.

And that won’t be evil. It’ll just be the way it is.

Matthew JC. Powell would like to keep some things to himself. Ask him what on mjcp@me.com