Forget Facebook privacy, your digital life is being monitored
ADITYA CHAKRABORTTY
May 26, 2010

The next time you hear the phrase ''internet privacy'', don't think of teenage infatuations heatedly committed to Facebook, of lads puking down their shirts and sticking the phone footage on YouTube, or of some hack writer tweeting about the progress of his colonic cancer. No, consider instead AOL Subscriber 4417749.

In 2006, AOL did something unprecedented in the history of the internet: it published a database showing what 658,000 members had searched for over three months. A mammoth exercise, this was also one of the most uncynical ever undertaken by a billion-dollar company - AOL shared the information for free, in the hope it would help researchers understand how people were using the web. It was also scrupulous about the confidentiality of customers. All subscriber details were scrubbed out, so that a login such as LimpCourgette223 became drab old User 338765. The only thing left was a list of 20 million search terms.

Except that list, coupled with a little patience, was all anyone needed to yank down AOL's privacy screen. A couple of New York Times journalists showed how easily it could be done. Trawling though the hundreds of searches made by Subscriber 4417749 for local estate agents and gardeners, through to ''numb fingers'', ''dog that urinates on everything'' and ''60 single men'', they tracked down Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow and pet-owner from Lilburn, Georgia. ''My goodness, it's my whole personal life,'' she said as the reporter read AOL's search records to her. ''I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.''

Going by that response, one assumes that she is not the sort to have a MySpace page, or to publish a blog detailing her drinking escapades. Nor will she be affected by Facebook's announcement this week that it will handle users' private information with more care. And that tells you much about what is missing in the debate over online privacy.

Your digital life can be split into two parts: content and data. You know plenty about the content: that oh-so-hilarious tweet you punched out after a night's drinking, or those pictures of the new baby posted on Flickr especially for your far-flung aunt. You create this stuff, and much of the privacy argument has been over whether strangers should be allowed to see it without your express permission. Yet all that is a handful of dust compared to the cascades of data about yourself that you shed daily.

What sort of information? Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute has a little riff: ''You wake up and check your email, which means the internet service provider now has fresh records on you. While walking to the train, you're caught by CCTV. You swipe your subway travel card, which has radio frequency identification technology and records your movements. Get into work and do some searching on the internet, giving Google more data to go on. Buy some lunch and you hand over a loyalty card which logs all your purchases . . .''

You get the drift. This used to be the stuff of dystopian fantasy for privacy campaigners, but then came Facebook and YouTube (both only six years old) and all the others - and the issues they raised proved to be just as distracting for the Big Brother watchers as for the rest of us.

Which is odd, because search engines and online retailers have only got better at taking our information and analysing it. Storage capacity has got cheaper, software more complex and companies smarter, so that we're now in what techy types call the age of metadata, or big data. Go to google.org/flutrends and you'll see one result: by collating searches with certain keywords, Google is better able to predict flu outbreaks than the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta. Similarly, Twitter is fast becoming an excellent guide to traffic disruption as users report jams.

No one would deny those are useful services. But the point is that we have handed over intimate information - in clicks and search terms and hours of browsing - about ourselves with barely any questions asked. And it puts all those debates about over-sharing information with your friends in the shade. Would we feel as comfortable if Google started an adultery-spotting service, or Twitter published a guide to far right-wing activity?

These are the sorts of issues the technology theorist Helen Nissenbaum has been pondering for years. In her new book, Privacy in Context, she argues that we are willing to give up our rights to privacy to certain ends; say, if a comment we post on the bottom of a blog is quoted elsewhere. The divide between private and public has become increasingly fuzzy in the internet age.

The problem with that argument is that it makes commercial internet enterprises the under-regulated custodian of our most intimate intentions and secrets.

And their interests are a million miles from ours.

Asked last December about whether users should be concerned about sharing so much information with Google, CEO Eric Schmidt replied: ''If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.''

And why would he say anything else? Google is now sitting on what one writer calls ''the database of our intentions'' - and it's a database worth billions.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a writer for The Guardian.