Anonymity: The New Privacy?

I’ve been pondering this whole “privacy” thing and the Internet.  The simple truth is that consumers (that’s you and me, by the way) willingly trade their privacy every day to get free access to the tools and services on the Internet.  Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and others are huge web sites that cannot be operated without a significant expense in bandwidth and infrastructure.  Advertising revenue fuels the Internet engine.  In fact, the Internet is the ultimate information engine – you give information with every click, to get information back.

Privacy advocates get press coverage at least once a month with the latest egregious privacy violation.  The FTC is trying to regulate how your personal information is used in an effort to protect you.  They demand that sites explain not only what they collect, but how the data are used.  This has been as effective as putting caloric and nutritional information on food packaging: Americans are still fat, right?  I think Internet users just don’t care so long as they get value in exchange.

Some argue that the consumer just doesn’t understand the implications of giving so much information on Internet. That may be true to some extent.  Most consumers believe that they are anonymous on the Internet.  Even the ones who know better will use proxies and other technologies to cover their tracks and hide their identities.  I still think it doesn’t matter what consumers know about the loss of their privacy. Look at the success of Facebook! It still is the top social networking site and yet you have its CEO claiming the end of privacy.  Google’s cloud services – email, document tools, storage, and phone – are highly popular and its CEO claims that there is no anonymity on the Web.

So from a consumer perspective it appears that anonymity is the new privacy. You can collect whatever you want on me, so long as you don’t really know who I am.

Let’s take this point a step further and move to the brick and mortar businesses.  Did you know that when you go shopping your buying habits are collected, analyzed and sold to target “consumer-driven” advertisement to you?  (Note that the term “behavioral marketing” is the focus of the FTC so they don’t call it that any more.) As an example, when you buy at your local food retailer, every item scanned is a collected and associated with your loyalty card or your credit cards. These are just numbers that may or may not be associated with a real name, address or phone number. But your buying habits are tied together and they can tell a lot about you, even if they don’t “know” who you are. This is yet another case of anonymity replacing privacy. But as a consumer, you’re OK with it because you get a coupon out of it!

And this leads me to my final point on privacy and anonymity: If it’s wrong for private industry to collect information on consumers, why is it OK for the government to do so, in the name of “security” and the “public good”?  And not only is the government collecting data from multiple sources on citizens and non-citizens alike, it is proposing to eliminate anonymity completely. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposes to do away with anonymous multiple identities in favor of one real identity. Part of the reasoning behind one trusted identity is to do away with Internet crime. (Do you really think this will even work?!)

As Bruce Schneier stated:

“If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can’t rely on market forces to maintain it.”