The IP Development Network Blog

It has been decided. Your use of telco services can be tracked, built into a profile and used to advertise to you. Everywhere you go on the internet and everywhere you take your mobile phone is data that operators can use to make money from you. It has been decided...

Sorry?

I am not a fundamentalist!
Regular readers will know that I am not a privacy nut. I don't believe in the stupid network, although I met its author David Isenberg over lunch on Tuesday at Telco 2.0 and found him to be a thoroughly absorbing, intelligent and genuinely nice fellow.

I was telling David how I think telcos can justifiably help the modern applications like Facebook, MySpace and WorldPay police the use of their services. My goal in such a theory is to protect legitimate users from sex pests, fraudsters and impostors - as outlined in my article on The Big Stick that telcos could use to "encourage" the adoption of their platform models.

Careering Down the Slippery Slope
Of course the problem is that with great power comes great responsibility. Little did I know that less than 3 hours after David and I parted, I would hear a presentation where this great responsibility has been totally ignored. This was not quite quite a slippery slope - it was more a slippery cliff edge.

The presenter detailed how his DPI equipment has been installed by a client for whom they log 36,000 events per second - today. They log everything that you do... I was left speechless, which was nothing compared to how I felt when another panelist brazenly stated that the privacy debate had happened already and that we had moved on.

By this point I was angry: this debate may have happened in a room full of personalised marketing specialists, but it has not involved Joe Public. To dismiss my concerns on the basis that I'm too late to have an opinion fundamentally misses the point that the user has been kept in the dark and the goalposts are moving rapidly as the capacity of technology to inspect, store and process increases.

It is like saying "it's rained enough", we'll have no more rain ever again on earth because Bangladesh is flooded.

False Justification
Apparently eight paedophiles in Italy have been arrested because of this vendor's DPI - tracked for sending MMS of abuse. No complaints here on that: this comes into the acceptable area as far as I am concerned, but the implication was that because the technology could do this amount of good, everything else they do was also permissible.

Sorry?

There is an ethical chasm between using DPI to address the evils that the internet has made possible, and using it to make money. For sure, there will always be a grey area, but what I heard was so dark that if right minded individuals heard it, they would recognise this as black.

Fobbing You Off
The data is not personally identifiable was another riposte. I disagree. There has to be a primary key and if all the data is being collected to develop adverts targeted at me, I don't think it matters whether they know me as Jeremy Penston, jpenston at ipdev dot net, 07733101607 or 82.69.75.210. The chances are that the database contains the lot anyway because most of it is in my email signature which will be read by the DPI every time I send and receive. If they couldn't identify me in some way, they couldn't target me - it doesn't matter what they call me, I'm still me.

My problem is not the targeting of adverts, it is the collection, storage and unknown manipulation of my profile in secret. Anyone who believes this is ok, I challenge you to go and talk to five of your friends (who don't work in telco) and tell them exactly how much is collected and why. If you can do so without feeling ashamed of what you believe in, then so be it, but I guarantee that most people in the street think that this only goes on in the NSA, MI5, Mossad and the FSB.

Perhaps your more clued up friends will know that Google could also be included in the above list but what the Big G sees of your usage is trivial compared to what your phone company does. At least until Google becomes a phone company...

Playing the Game the Right Way
Let me be practical. If you want to target adverts at me, then tell me what you are doing. Ask me permission at the time of use and give me something in return. Do not assume that because I told you where I live so that you can bill me, you can sell that same data to direct marketeers. Do not assume that because you know I just landed at Malaga airport on holiday, that you can send me an advert for a hire car. And, do not assume that because I gave you permission to use that data once, that I will always give you that permission. Does that sound fair?

I may sound like a Luddite, but the vast majority of the population knows nothing of what goes on inside the network. All I ask is that we be told what you know about me, how you would like to use it and what I will get in return so that I can decide whether to let you, ask you to delete it or change the bits that I feel are wrong.

We may not be as consumed by the need to remain anonymous as we were when Orwell wrote his stroll in the park. Social networks are proof that people want to share their lives with each other, but it is very dangerous to assume that because I share my life with my friends, that strangers can eavesdrop and use what they pick up to get inside my head. Do not assume that this debate has happened because Joe Public really has no idea of what is going on. Remember, the longest drought often ends with the mother of all thunderstorms.

Labels: privacy, targeted ads

# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 10/19/2007 02:53:00 PM

Friday, 19 October 2007

Luddites