What price paid in pact with purveyors of personal privacy?

It seems The Insider is not the only one ‘frightened by Facebook’. You may recall reading about his fears way back in March of this year, but it now seems others are feeling the same way.

In an article published over the weekend in Australia’s ‘National Times’, deputy editor Julian Lee spared no punches in his assessment of Facebook’s growing power as an information gatherer. He wrote, “If Facebook was a government agency, its power would be as undisputed as it would be frightening. For a single organization to know as much as it does about the habits, interests and behavior of 10 million Australians is unsettling.”

The point he was making was that if any government had as much up-to-the-minute information on its citizens as Facebook does there would likely be a huge public outcry, “yet here we have a privately-owned company accountable to no one operating with apparent immunity from the law.”

You can forget about governments legislating to provide legal protection on privacy of individuals. As Lee points out, “The hyperbolic pace at which technology moves is no match for the law.”

There are moves afoot in some countries, including Australia, to allow individuals to sue for breaches of their privacy in the wake of The News of the World hacking scandal, but much of the focus is expected to be on serious invasions of privacy by the media.  As Lee points out, the amassing and handling of ‘behavioral’ data by sophisticated technology companies like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn is at risk of coming a distant second. Assuming that anybody can accurately determine exactly what data is being collected and how it is actually being used.

The assumption is that it is used primarily for marketing and advertising purposes, but what happens if that same information falls into the wrong hands? Could it be used for nefarious purposes – maybe even for political or blackmailing purposes, e.g. we know what you do online at night?

To date, much of the focus of media attention on privacy related issues has been aimed at the big social networking sites, but how long before attention is turned to the telco community? After all, aren’t we claiming to know all about our customers and their behavior on our networks?

In our rush to promote just how clever we are at amassing data on our customers - whom we know by name and where they live and where they consume our services - we risk being put into the same category as Facebook, Google, etc. Exposing our data cache and capabilities may be necessary to attract potential advertisers to our platform but it also exposes us to the critical eye of governments and regulators that can impose restrictions on us far more easily than they can on the social networkers who appear to have free rein across the internet universe.

The rush to introduce and enforce ‘net neutrality’ rules may add another layer of complexity for regulators if privacy becomes a real issue. It might be difficult to explain the need for an open internet and then put restrictions on some of its biggest usage generators.

Perhaps Lee sums it up best when he says, “It’s the price we pay for such free services, the Faustian pact into which we have entered in order to survive in an age of constant connectivity where the tentacles of Facebook — with its ambition to be the ‘identity platform’ — are extending to every corner of the internet.

Which raises the question - if Facebook and Google place a value on your identity then why shouldn’t you?”