1. How 16 years ofWeb commerce has utterly transformed what privacy
means in the 21st centaury

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 Connects humanity
 Free information
 Unlimited information
 It’s open
 Allows infinite opportunities
 Makes us immortal

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Nonmonetary Market
Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson

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TheThree-Party Market
Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson

5. © 2010 Shivercube http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/03/10/technology/20080310_PRIVACY_GRAPHIC.html

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 The product online is not the content, it’s you
 The digital fingerprint
 More valuable than gold
 Pay with privacy, not money
 Thoughts and actions are tracked and traded
 Consumers are now commodities
 How much would you charge for someone to
read your personal diary?

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 Who does the cookie say you are?
 Are you the same person online as you are in
real life?
 Computers don’t understand context
 We ask search engines questions that we
would never even consider asking another
human being

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 We all want something for nothing
 MostWeb use is free
 You pay less, receive more
 Have more money to spend on other things
 Improves general wealth
 Free makes us happy

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 Digital information is valuable, but can’t be
returned
 Will you feel the same way about what you
did last night, not just the next morning, but
also 40 years later?
 Data collected today can have unintended
consequences later
 We have to all live like celebrities
 Once it’s there, it’s there for good

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 Who really owns all that information?
 What if the company gets sold
 Do you really trust them?
 In exchange for a freeWeb, our privacy has
become a commodity
 TheWeb isn’t a closed private bubble
 It’s all public
 We’re having conversations with computers
across the world
 We are all being watched

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 Each individual treated uniquely
 Personalised experiences
 TheWeb isn’t a broadcasting mechanism
 It’s a narrowcasting mechanism
 It’s good as long as it’s free!
 There’s a risk-reward ratio
 Reward outweighs the risk
 Convenience triumphs

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 Personalised experience
 Gives an advantage over traditional shops
 Amazon tells you what you might like to buy
 Netflix tells you what movies you might like
“Recommendation engines are very good at figuring out what people like me would do and telling me what
that is. So I can then find out what people like me do. I can become much more like a person like me…
Recommendation engines, by telling me what people like me do, and encouraging me to be like a person
like me, they help me to become more prototypically one of my kind of person. And the more like one of
my kind of person I become, the less me I am, and the more I am a demographic type.”– Douglas Rushkoff

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 Web created by scientists who wanted to
share information
 Web and money did not go together
 Commerce originally outlawed
 Then cameAmazon
 Then ecommerce revolution began
 Then cameGoogle
 Then the advertisement revolution began

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 An advertising company
 One of the biggest money-making machines
in history
 One of the most powerful companies in the world
 And they did it all by giving away things for free

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 True to the nature of theWeb
 Everything is free
 Gives information at your fingertips
 Adwords serves a single ad to a single person
 Every time
 Tries to make ads relevant to the content
 If you don’t like them, you don’t have to click
them
 They still make money and give you free services

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 $200 per second in 2009
 $6.5 billion in profit for the year
 They’re going to make money out of you
eventually
 You’re eventually going to view an ad
 Or click an ad
 Very targeted ad serving
 Beginnings of a monopoly over advertising
http://www.penn-olson.com/2010/01/22/money-googles-2009-net-profit-rose-by-50/

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 Reads your email
 Analyses it
 Places ads in the sidebar, based on email
content
 It’s free, but they’re listening
 Has it gone too far?

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 numb fingers
 60 single men
 dog that urinates on everything
 how to kill oneself by natural gas
 fear that spouse contemplating cheating
 depression and medical leave
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?_r=1

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 In 2006, AOL released a file
 Contained searches over the last 3 months
 Users only identified by a numerical code
 But information is so personal
 User 4417749
 Thelma Arnold
 62 year old woman
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?_r=1

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 Willingly give away personal information
 Facebook Connect
 Tracks websites
 Gives third parties access to personal information
 Special partners automatically get access
 Yelp
 RottenTomatoes

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 Track where you’ve been
 Determine what you like
 Track what types of things you’ve been
buying
 Predict what you’re likely to buy in the future
 Very valuable to advertisers

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 Virtually irrevocable persistent cookies
 Uses several storage mechanisms
 Recreates itself whenever deleted
 A browser exploit
 Likely to be fixed in the future
 http://samy.pl/evercookie/

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 TheWeb has to stay open
 Innovation has to continue
 The longer we’re online, the more attention
we pay
 The more information a business can capture
 The more ads they can sell
 It could be a good thing
 Personal information makes our experiences
better

25. © 2010 Shivercube