JG etc.

“Privacy is dead. Get over it.”

- Former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy

I remember when Gmail started to run contextually relevant ads, and the first thought was, “Wow, that is some pretty impressive computational skills Google has going on over there.” But then the reality sets in that the info is being run through their servers and is stored forever. Right now it is being used for ads, but what if the NSA wants it tomorrow? Guess whose door they are knocking on? My personal answer, I would rather just deal with the NSA problem when it happens, in the mean time give me some kewl integrated AJAX mail.

I remember showing some friends the ads and how they worked. They said things like, “damn that is scary” or “that is why im sticking with yahoo or hotmail, Google is doing things with my data that I don’t want them too.” To this day, I know very intelligent people that aren’t using Google services because they think they are doing something with user’s data, more than say, Microsoft or Yahoo are trying to do.

One thing that I find paticularly interesting about my generation is that while they are scared to death of intelligence that can scan emails, they have no problem putting their life online, say at MySpace. I don’t know whether it is the slow rendering of pages or the deceptively bad search, but people are shamelessly throwing their life online. I remember a friend that makes a lot of money at his day job, blindly putting in his MySpace profile where he worked, next to pictures of him at a lake with topless girls. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that, this is not a discussion on ethics. Let’s use a better example, and one that just happened to occur today. I subscribe to certain keywords on different search engines to keep up with the issues that I am interested in. It really is a great way to follow a meme or keep track of what people are saying about a company or a product. Here is an example of a post that popped up in my newsreaders today.

My drinking has been severely reduced thanks to being on a forced budget, I interviewed as a sales associate for “company x”

When I clicked on the link it took me to no other than, MySpace. Where, I’m guessing, this person thought they were innocently having a conversation with their friends. Now, did she know that her MySpace blog is being crawled by search engines? I doubt it. But to think that she so easily shares that information online and made it so easily discoverable is, in this case, not to her benefit. If you like too drink alot that is fine, but your life online is your new identity. What if “company x” subscribes to a keyword search on their name? You might as well have walked into the job interview with beer stains on your resume.

MySpace Data

This the kind of profile info they have you fill out on MySpace:

Name

Age

Sex

Location

School

Occupation

and a whole list of other things. What is really shocking is that with most of the profiles I have seen, the information is filled out honestly and accurately. This is great for MySpace from a lead generation perspective but in many circumstances not so good for the end user. MySpace feels much more like being with your friends at a bar with sawdust on the floor, than a job fair. I think users actions and MySpace’s setup on the site, reflect this sentiment.

MySpace needs to do a better job of letting users know that anyone can get a peek of you at the bar. I’m just not certain that people understand or would ever want all their personal meta attached to their MySpace profile. In many cases, the MySpace data is their only online identity, and all this data could potentially discovered by third party content aggregators. Worst of all, there is nothing you can do about it, it is not “your space” you don’t own the data.

Solution

Someone is going to make a lot of money around allowing a user to easily create, discriminately share, and own the content that they are creating online.

I’m interested to see if Vox tries to solve this problem.

So your privacy is dead, just let people know it.