It’s official: The Net has overtaken Big Brother as king of surreptitious personal information collection. Let’s all give a big hand to the World Wide Web, which needs our vital statistics as much as we need this insidiously wonderful bottomless pit of information.
Such is the quirky state of affairs in the post-Cold War world of the New Economy.
On one front, we have new Federal Trade Commission findings that many dot-coms are not safeguarding consumer privacy. No surprise there. Personal data, Web surfing habits and buying tendencies are captured, collated, cross-referenced and sold-usually without the knowledge of consumers.
And why not? If you’re a dot-com exec, data is your bread and butter. The Net business model of the future likely will be advertising-based. And with gobs of personal data, targeted advertising is possible. The idea, of course, is to personalize the Web experience. The wireless guys are still trying to figure all this out.
“If no targeted advertising is available on the Internet, it’s almost impossible to make the Internet work,” Kevin O’Connor, chief executive of online ad agency DoubleClick Inc. told the Associated Press in March.
If only Big Brother could boast the same success at peering into the lives of ordinary Americans. The trouble is, Big Brother is in a bit of a funk. FBI agents and spies-the intelligence community overall-are having a heck of a time following our conversations.
Indeed, in a blistering rebuke, the House select committee on intelligence chided the National Security Agency for not adapting to eavesdropping in the Digital Age.
“Each type of communication-radio, satellite, microwave, cellular, cable-is becoming connected to all the others,” stated a May 16 committee report. “Each new type of traffic shows up on every type of communication. Unfortunately, as the global network has become more integrated, NSA’s culture has evolved so that it is seemingly incapable of responding in an integrated fashion.”
The FBI, for its part, is under siege from the wireless carriers, wireline telcos and privacy advocates. The groups are challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s implementation of the 1994 digital wiretap act, arguing the agency gave the FBI electronic surveillance freedoms that are outside the wiretap law and/or unconstitutional on their face.
The wireless industry, among other things, says the FBI should not be tracking the location of wireless callers.
Out of court, in the e-commerce arena, it’s a different story. There, wireless location is the Next Big Thing.
