In the Parlance of Our Times

In case you haven't guessed, I'm a technology junkie. I'm a big fan of a lot that technology can do for us. But I have a huge concern about one major consequence of many new technologies and that's the erosion of our privacy.

I expect I'll write a lot more about this in future posts. But before doing so I wanted to make two points.

First, the irony of writing about loss of privacy on a blog is not lost on me. The privacy issue is one reason I've stayed away from blogging as long as I have. When I decided to take the plunge my co-worker, James, who is well aware of my feelings on this front, wrote "Welcome to the dark side. Privacy is overated". We'll see about that.

Second, I do not come to my views about loss of privacy lightly. Thirty years ago the boyfriend of a housemate at the time sat at my dining room table spouting what seemed like paranoid nonsense about privacy and banking. I was never very fond of this person, and took pleasure in arguing the issue with him. And so it pains me greatly to find myself now on the same side of the privacy debate as him.

Believe me, if I could still convince myself that there was nothing to be concerned about, I would.

Every time I look at a grocery store register slip and see I could have saved $5 on a $25 purchase if I had used their loyalty card I get angry. Why are the stores being so agressive about getting us to sign up for their cards? They already have agreggate data they can sell - how many people in our area buy Product X on a Thursday in May, for example - and if they really just want our loyalty they could give us coupons at the register ($5 off your next purchase, for instance).

Whatever the stores claim, these cards are absolutely about tying what you buy to who you are. There can only be one reason the stores want this information, and that's to sell it to someone who cares about it. And you can bet they're making more from the data than they're giving us back with discounts.

I have so far refused to be bought. The grocery store is one of the few places where it's still possible to shop anonymously - provided you pay cash and don't use their card - and I'd like to hang on to this last thread of privacy as long as I can.

But I'm weakening.

I have already given in to other loyalty programs, in particular hotels and airlines. In these cases I figure I get more than I give, since just by using their service they already get all of my personal information. When it comes to the supermarket, though, I can't get past the feeling that by signing up for their card I'm giving up something I'll never get back. At the moment, I'm still willing to pay the price for my privacy.

I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out. I'm working on my pseudonym and false address for the day when I finally cave. Just my little way of sticking it to the man.

I must sound like a broken record at work sometimes. Over the past few months I've had a number of conversations where I've given my views about privacy and the big free web services (Gmail, Flickr, De.licio.us, YouTube, Facebook, etc) that so many of us are drawn to. James, in particular, has been part of so many of these that he must start planning his exit strategy at the first hint that a conversation is heading towards the p-word.

For those who haven't yet had the pleasure of my opinions on this, here are my thoughts in a nutshell (James, feel free to skip ahead):

There is no free lunch. There's a price to be paid for these services, we just don't know what it is yet. At best it could be loss of our data, perhaps because the service starts charging a fee, goes belly-up or just plain burns out. At worst - and this is what I both fear the most and think is the most likely scenario - it will be the sharing of our data with third parties (companies wanting to sell to us, the government, etc) without our knowledge or permission. I'm concerned that so many people, mainly young people, are playing right into the hands of these large companies without so much as a thought as to what they may have to lose.

Last week I was at a meeting with three co-workers, all young men in their late twenties and early thirties. This topic came up and I gave them my views. I got the usual reaction from them. That is, they looked at me with the same polite, amused look you'd give your grandfather as he told of walking three miles to school. In the snow. Barefoot.

But then something surprising happened on Monday. One of these young men stopped by my office to say that over the weekend he'd seen a piece on TV that touched on some of these same issues, and it had got him thinking. Maybe there was something to what I'd been saying. He didn't sound like he planned to stop using these services, but he'll now be using them with his eyes open.

A small victory, to be sure. One that gives me hope, and renewed energy to continue making the effort to get people to think about what they are doing. James, it looks like I'm not going to be giving up this topic of conversation any time soon. You can thank Jason for that, next time you see him.

I shook my head yesterday when I read this Monkey Bites blog entry about users who are up in arms with the way Yahoo is using their Flickr images. Yahoo is showing thumbnails of Flicker images tagged Wii on the Yahoo Wii portal page. Users are objecting, and responding by tagging photos Wii - some quite funny, some quite rude - when they have nothing to do with Wii.

I shook my head, because once again it shows that users of these services are paying no attention to the Terms of Service agreements for these web services. The uproar stems from the misconception on the part of the users that they have a right to privacy on these very public sights. This is the second such incident I've noticed in the last few months - the first being the Facebook incident last fall, when Facebook added a new feature they thought users would enjoy, but the users saw the feature as an invasion of privacy.

I think some good will come from all this. More people are beginning to realize that they need to understand what they are agreeing to when they check that box that says "I have read and understand the Terms of Service agreement" and so more will at least attempt to read the text before checking the box.

That's all I ask.

The Boston Globe has a good article today summarizing some of the ways stores are using data gathered while we shop: Risks mount as stores mine a wealth of shopper data. They talk about loyalty cards - high on my list of things I'd like to "unvent" - but also credit cards, data collection at the register, etc.

Two quotes from the end of the article stand out:

"For some merchants, getting consumer data is the first priority, protecting is an afterthought...One reason: Penalties for failing to safeguard personal information are rare."

And:

"'Customers ought to be cautious and consider what they are gaining for giving that information, where the information is going and who else is going to have access to it,' [Lauren] Noether [chief of the New Hampshire attorney general's consumer protection and antitrust bureau] said. 'It may not be worth what they're getting in return.'"

Exactly.

The Boston Globe had an article today about a new service from one of the founders of ZipCar. This new service, GoLoco, combines car-pooling and social networking. I'm a huge ZipCar fan, so I was interested in learning more.

You know that little bell that goes off in your head when something doesn't seem quite right? It sounds like a 4-alarm fire in my head right now. There are so many things wrong here I could write for the rest of the year about it.

At first, as I read the Globe article, I was only a little uneasy. I grew up in the time when hitchhiking went out of fashion because it was proving so dangerous. The idea of arranging a ride share with a stranger definitely goes against the grain. But carpooling is a good thing, so I took a look at the GoLoco website to see if my fears could be eased.

They were, somewhat. The site describes all sorts of attractive rideshare opportunities that sound safe and pleasant - going to a ball game with like-minded fans, or using the site to arrange a night out with friends, for instance. So now I'm starting to feel better about this and move on to their terms of service. I was looking to find out more about how the fees work. Like Ebay, the site wants a piece of every shared ride you arrange through it. The total cost of the ride is calculated, divided evenly between driver and passengers. Passenger's pay their share to the driver and everyone pays 10% to GoLoco. That seems a bit steep to me, though on a short trip 10% may just be about 25 cents per passenger.

As I read through the Terms of Service the touchy-feely let's all ride to the park together feeling from the home page was replaced with those alarm bells. Not surprisingly, the tone of the TOS is more along the lines of "it's a big bad world out there and if anything goes wrong it's not our fault". The TOS touches on insurance issues (it's up to you, not them, to be sure the driver has adequate insurance), identity issues (they explicity state they do not verify identity), and privacy issues (you grant them full rights to your data which they can use any way they please, as long as they state how they will use it in their privacy policy - which can be changed whenever they like).

By the time I got down to the 13th item in the TOS I already knew this wasn't a service I wanted to use. So all I could do was laugh when I read it. It says this:

"13. Carbon Credits
You agree to assign the rights to any Carbon Credits resulting from any trips arranged using our service to GoLoco."

This whole notion of Carbon Credits - driving your SUV and then paying someone to plant a tree so now you're "carbon neutral" - is loony. But some people are buying into it and others are making money off it, and it looks to me like that's what GoLoco has in mind. You car pool and then GoLoco owns the Carbon Credits, which they could decide to sell to that guy in the SUV.

I expect this will all be a non-issue, as I don't see GoLoco really taking off. I don't think there's a big enough user base willing to pay a 10% fee to arrange a ride share. GoLoco is no ZipCar.