Enjoy your Google Telescreen

Recently, John Chasin of MediaPost wrote an opinion piece concerning proposed legislation by NY State Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky to allow for opt-out provisions to protect user privacy online - these privacy settings are designed to protect "personal" data from being used by web services to serve personalized, targeted advertisements to users across multiple web properties. See NYT piece about the legislation here.

Of course people have always been paranoid about privacy with regards to the web -- there are many reactionary privacy protection groups out there who go apeshit whenever a new technology comes out to threaten our privacy. Many also argue that privacy is an illusion. Several years ago, Reason Magazine released a stunning issue with a satellite image of their subscribers' homes printed on the cover -- in their piece called "Database Nation," they argue the benefits of corporations' ability to use customer information to more effectively target and and private services to consumers - as long as the government keeps their hands off the data.

But in today's post-9/11 age, there is no guarantee that the government will keep their hands off of this sort of data - witness the issue with telecoms passing information to government under the Foreign Services Intelligence Act. Recently, our President has pushed to pass legislation preventing corporations from being legally liable for violating their customer's privacy and handing over data to government (when the request is most likely illegal to begin with).

Based on the fact that government is capable of capturing this data and using it for their own purposes at will, I am completely for end users being able to opt-out of preventing  the collection and aggregation of user data. I don't dispute  the benefits of providing such data -- check out this content recommendation in my Google Reader:

Take a look at the second item -- the BassFan News recommendation. There isn't a single feed I subscribe to in my Google reader that relates to bass fishing. My Google Reader is full of geeky web blogs, some music stuff, national news, and some local news and information. Either Google coincidentally recommended something I would like, or they culled the data from elsewhere, most likely another Google service, such as Search or Gmail. Imagine the amount of data they'll be able to collect with Doubleclick code on the pages of 80% of publisher web sites.

Is the data serving my needs and bettering my experience? Yes. Will it help marketers (and Google) make money? Sure. It's a win win... except for one thing. Because at any moment the government seems capable of subpoenaing this information and to abuse it at will. And that is pretty scary, and not outside of what authoritarian regimes such as China are currently doing.

But perhaps instead of legislation demanding opt-outs on behavioral tracking, what we really need is for government to uphold our constitutional rights to privacy. Maybe large corporations, when faced with the prospect of widespread user opt-outs due to privacy concerns, will lobby government to push for tighter privacy legislation - keeping government hands off of their data. Of course, the average American is, for some illogical reason, more freaked out by corporations having their user data compared with the state.

Something I'll think about more as I read BASSFAN News ...