Free services are a form of honey pot for online services. They attract users and, as significantly, their private information, which in turn permits companies like Google and Facebook to sell advertising.
A lot of users, when they even consider the exchange, treat the advertising as a minor inconvenience. They may point to TV and note that our television broadcasting system was built on advertising, so why not use advertising to pay for cloud-based information services?
The problem is that info isn’t television. Television was important but advertisers had small effect on anything aside from probably dumbing down the content of the shows themselves. Nonetheless the integrity of private and commercial info is critical to the working of the modern economy and the requirement for advertising has a variety of damaging effects on the information services provided to consumers.
In my Value of Lost Privacy series, I highlighted the indirect effect of firms like Google using that personal info and behavior selling to permit advertisers like subprime lenders to prey on vulnerable populations and increase commercial inequality. But advertising has a more direct effect that makes most online information services less functional for all users and potentially harmful in their wider effects on data security and the structure of the web itself.
Deliberate Shortage of Security in Information Services : The necessity to collect user information in order to share it with advertisers suggests that online corporations purposively avoid encryption and other actions that would better protect user information. After technology analyst Chris Soghoian published a Times op-ed noting that most correspondents did not recognize the lack of security in web services, Google’s top D.C. Privacy lobbyist, William DeVries, wrote on his very own Google+ page that Chris was “dead right. Reporters (and blog writers, and small companies) need to take a couple hours and learn how to use free, generally available safety features to store information and communicate.”
The question , as Soghoian indicated on his own site in a follow-up post, is that Google products aren’t secure out of the box on purpose “because the firm’s business design is dependent on the monetization of user info, the company keeps as much info as possible about the activities of its users. These extensive notes aren’t just helpful to Google’s engineers and advertising teams, but are also a delicious target for law enforcement agencies.” Vint Cerf, Google’s “Chief Net Evangelist” admitted latterly on a panel that “we couldn’t run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn’t know which ads to show you. So this is a system that was designed around a selected business model.”
This suggests not only repressive governments can more straightforwardly obtain access to your info but ID thieves and other black hat hackers can also. Site after site asks for user names and passwords, many users repeating the same password, so that hacking one unsecure site suddenly opens every online account to burglary and vandalism.
Shortage of Online Anonymity : Tied into the requirement to sell to advertisers is the inflating refusal of online services to permit unnamed users. “On the Net, Nobody Knows You are a Dog” — once a standard joke about anonymity online — has give way to a Large Brother-ish demand for continual identity checks by online sites.
Google’s obligation that only “real names” be used in online Google+ accounts is the most recent example of this, with CEO Eric Schmidt admitting latterly in an interview that the reason is to make it an “identity service” to sell people things:. As Schmidt explained :
“if we knew that this was a real person, then we could kind of hold them responsible, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we might have credit cards and so forth.”
“Apple and Google both seem inquisitive about NFC technology (near-field communication),” writes, Mathew Ingram at the site Gigomon, “which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets, and having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy.”
This hard-line against anonymity means that the viewpoints of political dissidents or worker whistleblowers who don’t want their names revealed are silenced in such environments, all for the sake of making advertisers contented and facilitating e-commerce by online corporations.
Bad Web Design : It isn’t as life-threatening a difficulty, but advertising drives web design (in Croatian translate web dizajn) that’s repugnant, confusing and time-intensive for users. So as to maximize “page views” that may each hold advertising and generate advertising money, articles are parsed into multiple pages. The Columbia Journalism Review describes an identical “Faustian bargain” of the proliferation of multiple-page “slide shows” to in a similar fashion generate multiple page views to generate ad dollars.
This is mixed with pages where advertisements control more display space, where as the Knight Digitised Media Center explains, “”As news operations scrabble for revenue, advertisers have gained leverage to demand more–and more prominent–digital space. The resulting ad-heavy homepages make business sense–but the result is visually ‘appalling.’”
Bolstering the “Tawdry” Side of Capitalism : Web idealist Jaron Lanier, who has been writing about the Web since before the majority ever heard of its existence, argues that such identity-based appeals by companies gives advertising a terrible name. He argued in an interview a couple of months ago :
Google’s thing is not advertising because it’s not a romanticizing operation. It doesn’t involve expression… It’s just a bit small minimalist link, and essentially what they are selling is not advertising, they’re not selling love, they’re not selling communication, what they are doing is selling access…”You give us cash, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you.”
Lanier observes that companies exploiting such identity-based access are not usually from the “dignified side of capitalism” but rather “tend to be a lot of ambulance chasers and snake oil salesmen.”
So in pursuit of those low-road advertisers, we see many online info services building web sites that are less secure, less functional, uglier and weaken political liberty in the service of the requirements of those advertisers.
An Alternative to Advertising : The upward push of paid programs has shown one alternative road where little payments by users encourage firms to design services solely in the interests of users instead of third party advertisers. Even services directly on the internet often utilise a “freemium” model that eschews advertising in favour of providing basic free services to any user, while gaining money from a smaller subset of users who like the service enough to pay a subscription to unlock more advanced features.
To help that alternative of Web design only In the interests of users, we need policy to better preserve user privacy so that no company can track or share user info without that user’s direct opt-in to each use of their info. Clearer transactions around loss of user information to advertisers (and most likely to hackers and ID thieves because of shortage of security) will encourage more of those users to select better-designed and safer paid choices as reported tagza.com.