AWARENESS CAMPAIGN (Part 5): Commercial Mass Surveillance As a result of the digital revolution, many aspects of life are now captured and stored in digital form. Concern has been expressed that governments may use this information to conduct mass surveillance on their populations. One of the most common forms of mass surveillance is carried out by commercial organizations. Many people are willing to join supermarket and grocery loyalty card programs, trading their personal information and surveillance of their shopping habits in exchange for a discount on their groceries, although base prices might be increased to encourage participation in the program. Since a significant proportion of purchases are carried out by credit or debit cards, which can also be easily tracked, it is questionable whether loyalty cards provide any significant additional privacy threat. Through programs like Googles AdSense OpenSocial and their increasing pool of so-called web gadgets, social gadgets and other Google-hosted services many web sites on the Internet are effectively feeding user information about sites visited by the users, and now also their social connections, to Google. Facebook also keep this information, although its acquisition is limited to page views within Facebook. This data is valuable for authorities, advertisers and others interested in profiling users, trends and web site marketing performance. Google, Facebook and others are increasingly becoming more guarded about this data as their reach increases and the data becomes more all inclusive, making it more valuable. New features like geolocation give an even increased admission of monitoring capabilities to large service providers like Google, where they also are enable to track ones physical movements while users are using mobile devices, especially those which are syncing without any user interaction. Googles Gmail service is increasingly employing features to work as a stand-alone application which also might activate while a web browser is not even active for synchronizing; a feature mentioned on the Google I/O 2009 developer conference while showing the upcomingHTML5 features which Google and others are actively defining and promoting. In 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, said: The arrival of a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a huge revolution At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 16 February 2010, Google presented their vision of a new business model for mobile operators and trying to convince mobile operators to embrace location-based services and advertising. With Google as the advertising provider, it would mean that every mobile operator using their location-based advertising service would be revealing the location of their mobile customers to Google. “ Google will also know more about the customer - because it benefits the customer to tell Google more about them. The more we know about the customer, the better the quality of searches, the better the quality of the apps. The operator one is required, if you will, and the Google one will be optional. And today I would say, a minority choose to do that, but I think over time a majority will... because of the stored values in the servers and so forth and so on.... ” —2010 Mobile World Congress keynote speech, Google CEO Eric Schmidt Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are constantly informing users on the importance of privacy, and considerations about technologies like geolocation. Computer company Microsoft patented in 2011 a product distribution system with a camera or capture device that monitors the viewers that consume the product, allowing the provider to take remedial action if the actual viewers do not match the distribution license.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:40:52 +0000
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