New technology comes with new privacy concerns
BY ARJUNA SORIANO
NEVERTOLATETOBENEWBRAND
New technology comes with new privacy concerns
BY ARJUNA SORIANO
NOV 10, 2011
New technologies such as Apple Inc.’s Siri and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle Fire are pushing both the limits of mobile technology and the amount of data that can be collected about users. High-speed cellular service and relatively slow mobile hardware has supercharged hand-held devices and upped the ante on privacy concerns.
“I think that individuals do not understand that they are providing all of this detailed information when they sign up for services,” said Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for the American Civil Liberties of Illinois. “We need to make sure engaging in public life doesn’t result in harm or intrusion upon an individual’s privacy,” warns Ed Yohnka.
Apple's latest iPhone, the 4S, houses weapons-grade technology in its glass body. Siri, a project that originated in the depths of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, allows the user to interact and control the phone’s features by speaking to it in everyday language.
Some experts even think Siri may be the next major advance in computing.
“[Siri] shifts the competition from platforms positioned on a device to a ‘coupled’ super-platform dependent on broadband and infrastructural computing,” said Asymco.com founder and analyst Horace Dediu.
Getting Siri to run on the relatively underpowered iPhone required a high-speed connection to Apple’s powerful servers to help process user requests.
Siri has caught the imagination of the public and the tech world. Countless YouTube videos and websites have sprung up dedicated to the funny things it says. When asked who makes the best cell phone, Siri replies, “Wait... there are other phones?” Siri now has its first single, singing a lovely duet with Internet rocker Jonathan Mann.
Siri relies on saving users’ requests to adapt and improve upon its responses. It is not clear if actual recordings of user voices are being saved or if it is only the content of the requests that are being collected.
Not to be outdone, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is challenging Apple’s iPad in the tablet computer market. Amazon focused on creating a product with a low price tag, which meant less computing power and less speed.
To make up for slower hardware, Amazon engineered a web browser that like Siri borrows computing power from high-speed Web servers. That should mean that web sites will show up faster on the device.
“The content of Web pages you visit using Amazon [Fire] passes through our servers and may be cached to improve performance on subsequent page loads,” states the Amazon privacy agreement.
In other words, Amazon servers not only see what users are doing on the Fire’s browser, they also save a copy of the content.
The new strategy of using Web servers to boost the power of mobile devices is causing concern among privacy advocates.
“New technologies are radically advancing our freedoms but they are also enabling unparalleled invasions of privacy,” warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation on its website.
One reason Google Inc. is able to return such accurate and helpful search results is because it collects previous searches and ranks results depending on what site users most often click on.
Email providers obviously save all user emails on remote computers. They also scan email subjects and content to weed out spam and allow them to provide relevant advertising.
Facebook knows who our friends and family are and they even use face recognition technology on every photo uploaded to its servers. This last practice has gotten
Facebook into legal trouble in Germany where the government has gone to court about it.
Critics complain that Google Inc. and Facebook are trying to become some sort of Big Brother.
“It’s kind of scary,” said Occupy Chicago participant Jill Johnson. When asked why Occupy Chicago still uses social media services like Facebook and Twitter she responded, “It is the only way we can get our message out.”
In light of rampant privacy concerns, it may be puzzling why companies continue to amass user data.
The bottom line is they make money from it.
Google has turned the information into advertising dollars, lots of them. It reported second-quarter revenue of $6.82 billion, 97 percent of which came from selling advertising.
Not just any type of advertising, though. The real moneymakers are "targeted ads," or ads that relate to the things that users like. "They are giving an experience that is more relevant to the user,” said Cary Lawrence, vice president of SocialCode LLC, an agency specializing in targeted advertising campaigns on Facebook. "What we found was, ads that had interest targeting had a 54 percent higher click-through rate and a 176 percent higher 'like' rate."
There is also a secondary danger inherent in gathering all of this user data in one place.
“It is often used in ways that consumers have no idea it is being used. That includes the sharing of information with government agencies,” said Yohnka of the ACLU.
Digital privacy watchdog, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, “...by logging your online activities these companies are creating a honey pot of personal information potentially available to any party wielding a subpoena.”
The government, in fact, can compel a service provider to disclose the contents of an email that is older than 180 days with nothing more than a subpoena, according to senior counsel for Google, Richard Salgado.
The government has been taking full advantage of this. Various agencies have requested information from Google at an increasing rate, almost 6,000 requests in the first six months of 2011. Google has handed over user data 93 percent of the time.
To its credit, Google has been pushing for reform in online privacy laws and it is the only large company to release data on government information requests made by agencies.
It is a bit scary, but Darryl Frazier of Chicago who uses social media and his iPhone to communicate with his family has an old-fashioned solution. “I try not to put too much personal information out there.”
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