Surveillance as a Service

Had to link to this post by the Grauniad's Seth Finkelstein about Google and the other surveillance companies, especially in the light of all the stuff coming out of SXSW and World of Networks II on Trust & Privacy issues:

To best understand the issues, it's important to separate out the social ends – refining ads – from the technological means, which is massive monitoring of user activity. Too many discussions of the topic get bogged down in what's essentially an argument of "the end justifies the means", where a nominally beneficial goal of better advertising is presented as sufficient to trump all further implications.

He also points out that there is a turf war between the search players and the ISPs:

A Business Week article bluntly stated: "Phorm could present strong competition for the ad-serving platforms purveyed by the likes of Google and Microsoft".

As the law professor Eric Goldman commented during the controversies last year, in a post on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog: "From my perspective, the battles over the legality of Phorm and NebuAd are a smokescreen for the real issue, which is that marketers who have only server-level data don't want to compete against someone who has a better dataset than them. So expect plenty of continued fireworks over Phorm and NebuAd, but don't kid yourself that it's only the ­privacy advocates beating up on them."

Update - an article on TechCrunch on "What could go wrong with Google" has all sorts of potential issues, but this one - the competition for data analysis for Adserving - must surely be the key reason)

Tim Berners Lee has also added his weight to this discussion. And this refrain of his below is something I'm hearing more of:

At the very least, there should be safeguards and oversight that do not rely on the assurances of big businesses, which have every incentive to minimise any lapses or failings. No matter how benign the original intent, large collections of personal data, especially combined with the economic pressures of a deep recession or a government interest in data-mining for security purposes, are fraught with the potential for evil.

In fact, one of my takeaways from World of Networks is that the Tech of Web 2.0 is sort of done, now increasingly the real fight is about the ethics and the tradeoff between privacy and efficiency..