The recent fuss about The NSA and GCHQ allegedly spying on Second Life users largely made me go “meh”. I mean this is what I expect those agencies to do and I really can’t see any way of stopping them doing it. However there is a level whereby I feel protestations about intrusive behaviour could work, that’s at levels way below the security agencies, it’s with tech companies.
AT&T are, according to Gigaom, rolling out a new gigabit service in Austin in two flavours. Premier, for USD$70 a month and Standard, for USD$99 a month. The terminology sounds odd, with premier being the cheaper option. However here’s the catch, the cheaper option means you need to agree to being part of AT&T preferences, which is targeted advertising, or as AT&T themselves explain:
“U-verse with GigaPower Premier offer is available with your agreement to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences. AT&T may use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and ads tailored to your interests. ”
So basically for the cheaper option, you sell your browsing habits it seems. This idea isn’t new, websites with advertising will often have the option to turn off the adverts for a fee. However it’s still very creepy.
When the recent hoo-ha broke about the spies it wasn’t the NSA or GCHQ involvement I found creepy, nor was it Linden Lab talking to the NSA about virtual worlds. The NY Times article claims that Cory Ondrejka was the senior Linden exec involved and reports:
“In 2007, as the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, N.S.A. officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance.
He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement.”
That all sounds very reasonable to me, Cory seems to be using his knowledge of his old industry and showing them the power of virtual worlds, it’s the next part of the article where it all goes a bit tits up:
“It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.””
That’s where it all gets a bit creepy.
I don’t know who decided that virtual worlds could be used to observe non-Americans in that manner and the article doesn’t explain that but it is undoubtedly creepy.
This week we saw the bizarre sight of eight tech companies complaining about the potential loss of trust in the Internet due to actions of the NSA. The companies were Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL.
This is where everything gets murky because some of those companies have actively undermined the concepts of privacy in the Internet age. They want you to tell the world everything about yourself and some of those companies have a habit of changing your default settings when you feel you have a little bit of privacy, so that you now find that the settings you were happy with have been changed to settings where everything is more public.
I find it quite staggering that companies who have poured scorn on principles of not talking to strangers and not accepting sweets off strangers are now complaining that the very function creep they have encouraged is being taken advantage of by the security services. Some of them tell us that real names defeat trolls, that pseudonyms are bad, and yet it’s that very public discussion they’ve encouraged that allows information gathering on such a widespread scale
The privacy debate, I believe, is firmly lost and some of the complaining tech companies need to hang their heads in shame. However if you do want to protest about privacy, don’t take your complaints to government, because the security services will do what they deem necessary to fulfil their role, take your complaints to the very companies who have undermined privacy in a very public way, that’s the starting point for reigning this in.
Ultimately though, even if anonymity on the internet is largely a myth, people can help themselves by not posting so much information about themselves in public forums.