How will consumers react to big data’s big dark side?
On Friday we learned that not only has the American National Security Agency been tracking Verizon customers’ call metadata, it’s been collecting user data from major internet companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and AOL, as well as records from AT&T, Sprint-Nextel, ISPs and credit card companies. For marketers and others who rely on user data as a business tool, the big questions are about what consumers expect in terms of data privacy, how big is big data’s dark side, and how the big brands on the NSA’s list will be affected.
Google, Facebook and many of the other companies named as NSA data providers have denied participation in the program, but marketers and media companies are holding their breath to see which way the public opinion needle will swing. (Update: Google CEO Larry Page has issued a response to the allegations.)
Here’s the chatter on the NSA and privacy:
Simon Dumenco @ Advertising Age isn’t impressed:
How quickly can Microsoft pull its “Your privacy” campaign? And what can all the companies caught up in this do to mitigate the fact that they seem like clueless dupes? As of this moment, we have nine companies saying they didn’t provide “back-door access” (as Google put it) to the government, while the government is saying, um, yes, you did.
David Meyer @ GigaOm says we can expect big fallout for these companies in overseas markets:
And nowhere more so than in Europe, which is already in the throes of a wide-ranging debate over data privacy… As EU data protection rules don’t say it’s OK for foreign military units to record or monitor the communications of European citizens – heck, even local governments aren’t supposed to be doing that – the Safe Harbor program (in which Facebook, Google and others on the list are certified) now looks questionable to say the least.
Mike Wheatley @ siliconAngle says that this is vindication for Twitter, which wasn’t on the list:
Actually, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that Twitter isn’t bending over backwards to feed your personal data to the feds – after all, its track record for respecting its user’s privacy rights is far superior to most other technology firms. While companies like Google routinely comply with government subpoenas asking for information, Twitter has developed a reputation for putting up a fight. Which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently saw fit to award it a six out of six rating for its efforts to protect users from the government.
As for consumers, security expert Bruce Shneier @ CNN says they no longer have any choice but to submit to surveillance:
There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it’s fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don’t like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don’t spy. This isn’t something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us.
Douglas Rushkoff @ CNN finds it hard to get worked up about the reveal, comparing the NSA’s big-data dragnet approach to that of marketers:
Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That’s how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism — and for this, they need us. The only way for them to identify the kinds of statistical anomalies that point to a terror candidate is to have a giant database of all those behavior patterns that don’t suggest imminent violence. What is different about the Tsarnaev brothers’ patterns of telephone usage from that of every other young male Chechen immigrants? You need both sets of data to figure that out. We are not the targets so much as the control group.
But Susan Landau told the The New Yorker metadata collection is more intrusive than recording the content of their phone calls:
For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. (…) Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.
(Landau is also the author of the current top post on The Huffington Post.)
Meanwhile Alexandra Petri @ The Washington Post offers a satirical – if a little chilling – take with an article titled “America needs to call its grandma, NSA says”:
“Seriously,” the NSA went on. “We know who you are calling, every call of every day, as the AP says. (…) And I know you talk a good game about your grandmother and how much she means to you, but we can state for a fact that most of your calls are not to her. For instance, Darrell here has called his grandmother zero times in the past month but has placed repeated calls to Domino’s, even though we have records of him stating that ‘their pizza tastes like cardboard’ and that ‘they said they changed it up, but I can’t really taste the difference’ on other calls (also not to his grandmother). He has also called his wife six times; a woman who is not his wife, three times (but all of those were short calls during daylight hours, so probably it’s nothing to be overly concerned about); his daughter, 18 times, all one evening after her presumed curfew; and what we have discovered was the 800 number for ExtenZe Male Enhancement two times, first hanging up after 30 seconds in confusion, then redialing it, then hanging up immediately.”
Gizmodo has initiated a reader discussion about consumer data privacy, and Storify has collected a large number of tweets from experts and consumers on the topic. The NSA’s surveillance program also now has a Twitter account, @PRISM_NSA:
America, you’re looking great today. Specifically, you’re looking 4.71% better than a typical June Friday.
— PRISM US Gov (@PRISM_NSA) June 7, 2013
