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Privacy Ain’t What It Used to Be
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for June/July 2004
This is not a column about Google. Okay, maybe a little at the beginning, but I promised myself I wouldn’t write about Google for at least another several months. How can I resist, though, when they keep coming out with new and provocative stuff like Gmail?
Gmail is their new free e-mail service, currently in beta testing. Like other such services, messages will come surrounded by or embedded with advertising; this is the price we pay for otherwise free e-mail access. I’ve been a Hotmail user for years, creating faux identities and e-mail addresses that I use to register for websites, as spam collectors, and so on; it comes in very handy.
The real crucial distinction, though, is that Gmail will have a humongous storage capacity: 1 gigabyte, compared to the now-measly 2 MB from Hotmail, and roughly equivalent to a half-million pages of straight text.
Also unlike those services, Gmail will attempt to focus and target that advertising by searching the contents of e-mail messages. This seems a fairly logical and straightforward extension of their current advertising program, which pulls up sponsored links as results of searches. I’ve used those links once in a while, especially in areas where I don’t really know anything.
With this announcement came the fairly predictable and axiomatic privacy concerns, as you can imagine. I’ve read interviews with people who weren’t really crazy about the idea of “Google reading their e-mail.” Google people say that, of course, no people will be involved, that it’s all automatic.
I have to admit, though, the general reaction seemed a little muted to me. I’ve also read several pieces, including a very interesting one from Tim O’Reilly (he of the O’Reilly tech books with the cool animals on the cover), that say this is no big deal. Some people have also said they thought this was a great idea—if you get a message from a friend discussing your mutual devotion to Fleetwood Mac, it might come with an ad for CDs or yet another reunion tour.
Indifferent to intrusions
In particular, the reaction from young people has been very ho-hum. They seem not to be very exercised about this—and it should be noted that several thousand people signed up fast for the beta test of Gmail. Perhaps they just don’t care, or have become used to giving up their personal information in exchange for all kinds of free stuff.
Or maybe they’re just tired of worrying about it. I got an envelope in the mail yesterday from a bank or credit-card company or something that said “Important: Changes to Your Privacy Policy” on it. I threw it in the pile of things to be dealt with someday. I, for one, see “privacy policies” on websites, at the doctor’s office, wherever, and assume that a) I won’t understand them, and b) when push comes to shove, I’ll be given up some day. JetBlue did it, so did Northwest Airlines and American, forwarding millions of records of various kinds to the feds. Why not my bank? My employer? Google?
I value and have always been impressed with the work of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center that continue to fight for individual rights in the digital world. I’m glad they’re watching out for us, paying attention to these issues—somebody’s got to.
In the library world, we still have work to do waging the USA Patriot Act fight, while at the same time purging logs and records (and giving up the benefits we know we could get from analyzing them) so we don’t have to cough them up if and when the knock comes at the door.
Privacy and confidentiality have always been central to library work. Circulation records, reference transactions, and now catalog and web transaction logs have all been protected by professional ethics as well as state laws that we have perhaps taken for granted. If the people we serve can’t be sure that they can ask and read whatever they want without worrying that other people will find out about it someday, what’s the point?
In a climate of “heightened awareness” and suspicion, and perhaps diminishing vigilance and increasing fatigue on privacy in this society, will our commitment start to wither? And if it does, will the people we serve care? Or even notice? That, I fear, is another story.