Location Services

Keeping your life private these days may be harder than you think.  You can shun social media and decline to "check-in" on Facebook or Foursquare, but you may still be carrying your cellphone around and it could be collecting information on you that your cellphone provider may be packaging and selling.  So reports the Wall Street Journal.

Your data is the big goldmine of online life.  Companies like Facebook and Google have histories on what you like and search and they use it to make money.  This is generally done by using that information to match your activity, likes, and searches with advertisers who may have a product in which you would be interested.

Those pesky ads that slip into your Facebook feed or pop up next to your Google search results are a product of  this type of data mining.  Google recently has been trying to resolve legal and public relations difficulties that resulted from its priority display of advertisers' sites ahead of other hits in its online search results.

The WSJ article points to another well-know fact of modern life.  If you have a cellphone, smart or not, the phone company (a.k.a communications Goliaths like Verizon and ATT) have data on you.  Lots of people may want that data, particularly on where go and who you call or on searches that you make through a smartphone.

One the one hand, you should be concerned about your civil liberty.  When something goes work, government law enforcement agencies, whether federal, state or local, may want to know a lot about you was talking to whom at the time of a certain event.  Think about the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon.  Law enforcement relied very heavily on video surveillance cameras in the area of the bombing to identify suspects.  Later, a cellphone's location tracking helped police follow the suspect's movements.  There is recent story of NYC police chasing down a stolen cellphone using the tracking system, complete with a "French Connection" car chase. (Here are links to reports by UPI, The Blaze and The Times Ledger)

Here's a part of the WSJ article on the new interest that cell carriers have in cashing in on your activities:

The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

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The new offerings are also evidence of a shift in the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google and Facebook.

It is unlikely that large cellphone carriers are going to turn their backs on the money to be made here.  They also insist in the WSJ article that they are taking care not to give advertisers anything that would identify individual users.  So, until we have a stricter set of laws about what happens to your data, the corporate holders of this data are essentially asking you to trust them.

So, what are you to do if you do wish your activities to be mined? You may not be able to do this completely without getting rid of your cellphone or other mobile device --- anything that connects to a network and therefore accumulates data on your activity with whoever runs the network.  But, there are some simple things that you can do to be more careful about the data that is accumulated.  To begin, be careful what you post on social media like Facebook and Foursquare.  When you check-in, you are telling someone where you are and the network will have that information in its storage of data on your activity.

Also, with applications on smartphones (Apple or Android) remember that many of those applications ask you to let them access your location through location services setting on the phone.  Think about that before you authorize such use.  It may make some sense to let the application know where you are when you want to get directions from that location to somewhere else.  What about knowing the weather?  That seems logical, but you can always enter in applications like The Weather Channel app the location for which you want the weather information rather than let your phone tell them where you are in real time.  I have The Weather Channel app set to give me the weather in five or six different places around the world and I am not in all of them (or any of them) simultaneously.

Go to the Settings menu on your phone and go through the applications to see which ones have location services turned on.  Decide (a) whether you need the application at all (our phones are often bloated with applications that we do not use; I am slowly trying to get rid of them) and (b) does it make any sense at all for the application to know where you are?

Also, while it is comforting to know that there is an application that can find your smartphone if it is lost or stolen (or down beneath the cushions on your couch), you may want to consider turning off your smartphone completely from time to time --- for purposes of privacy and just plain old peace and quiet.

Piracy, Privacy and Money, Money, Money - Part II

This is the second in a series.

PRIVACY

I have written here before about privacy and likely will again.  It has been an important area of  American constitutional law since the drafting of the Bill of Rights.  Since that day when Alexander Graham Bell summoned Watson with words spoken over his telephonic invention, we have becoming increasing concerned with protecting various forms of telephonic and electronic communication.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled United States v. Jones that the government needs to obtain a search warrant to track the public movements of a person by attaching a GPS device to the person's vehicle.  Antoine Jones was a suspected drug dealer who lived in DC.  Authorities had a warrant for Jones in the District of Columbia and attached a GPS device to his car to follow his movements.  Information on Jones' movements in Maryland was collected, however, and authorities had failed to get a warrant in Maryland. The Court split 5-4 on how the 4th Amendment applied in this situation.  Here is a link to a further discussion of the case at Marketplace Tech Report. 

The  Jones decision may become landmark of constitutional law.  It certainly will be important in understanding the current interface between technology and privacy.  We have seen societal situations that raise significant questions in this area. In recent political movements from the "Arab Spring" to the "Occupy" movement, electronic means of communication such as Twitter and Facebook have been used to organize protest. In response, Arab governments first tried to shut down these communications.  More recently, and more ominously, governments have been monitoring these communications in order to find dissidents and suppress protest.

The Jones case may begin to tell us where constitution protections attach in a world where we are revealing more and more about ourselves through electronic communications.  Consider, however, that we now reveal a great deal of information about ourselves willingly on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking services.  If Antonie Jones had been checking in on Facebook or FourSquare, would government monitoring of his postings and travels been protected?

One important question continues to be what expectation of privacy we have when we use such social networking services.  When people sign-up for these services, they must agree to contractual agreements that provide the terms under which the service is provided.  These terms of service agreement set out important legal rights to material posted and privacy policies.

Of note recently is that both Google and (yet again) Facebook have changed their privacy policies.  These changes have received wide publicity. As we provide more and more personal information on such services, including using such services to reach  or interact with others online destinations, these policies are very important to our online privacy.  These policies, however, are not really intended to protect our privacy as much as they are to govern what information Google or Facebook or other service providers can access and use for their own business purposes.

Remember that Google, Facebook and other online services are businesses looking to make a profit. 

These social networks want you to post personal information on their services.  Such sharing is fundamental to the business model on which such services are built.  The information that you share encourages your friends to join to see your posts and to share their own information.  This cycle brings more and more people onto the network.  Participants keep the treadmill of information spinning round and round by providing the product for the social network.  In one way or another, good Internet businesses use our information and usage history to make money.

Not only are the users the product, but they are also a potential customer. Let's take a look at a simple scenario.  You go to Google and search for information on the book, "The Devil and the White City".  You find links to various bookseller's sites and go to them.  Google now knows that you may be interested in books, even the type of book, and can place paid advertising for a booksellers on your search pages.  Or you go to Amazon and buy the book.  Amazon knows that you purchased this book and will recommend similar books to you in the future when you visit Amazon.

In one sense this is good for you.  You may get "better" search results or better service, because the search engine or the vendor knows something more about our preferences.  This is certainly a critical element that makes such services "smarter" and, thus, faster in getting us to the things we are trying to find.  What you may not realize, however, is that your activities are leaving behind a kind of electronic footprints or fingerprints, showing where you have been on the Internet and what you have been viewing.

Technologically, much of this deals with little pieces of code called "cookies" that you leave behind in your travels in cyberspace.  These markers allow sites to recognize you next time you visit and improve your use of sites, but they are digital signposts as to where you have been and what you have seen or done.

Do we want this kind of information available?  If we do, to whom -- Google? Facebook? Amazon? The government?  What limits are there?  Privacy policies and terms of service are designed to protect this information from general dissemination.

There is a conflict of interest, however, because most commercial sites want to use such information to target you for advertising or products when you use the sites.  Such sites do not want to give up the use of such information entirely, because it would mean cut off a significant source of their revenue and profit -- advertising or sales.  Once the site has the information, however, when should it be made available beyond the reach of the terms of service to which you agreed?

These are important societal questions deeply embedded in the technology that we use today.  It will not be easy to draw lines here, especially because of the money involved.  More on the money in the final post in this series.