Data Is The Nuclear Waste Of The Information Age: On Big Tech And Privacy

There’s scarcely a word you hear more from big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google than “privacy” these days. To adblocker and privacy-focused browser vendor Ghostery however, what they mean when they say privacy is not what you mean when you use that word.

“They’re all redefining privacy to their own benefit in a lot of ways,” Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz told me recently in a TechFirst podcast.

“But obviously, I think privacy should be defined from the perspective of the user, right … that’s the only perspective that actually counts.”

For instance, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency defines privacy as companies not sharing data they’ve gathered about you with other companies without your permission … not companies gathering data about you, period. Google’s often-delayed deprecation of the third-party cookie (just delayed again, recently) will prevent cross-site tracking, which is good for privacy, but doesn’t hurt Google at all because Google has a first-party relationship with you. And Facebook’s ever-more-detailed privacy settings outline in excruciating minutia who (besides Facebook) can see everything about you, but doesn’t protect you from the big social network you’re giving everything to at all.

So even with all the talk, talk, talk … we’re all still naked in the dark on the web, at least in terms of our personal data and digital behavior.

“Some data points are being leaked about every American 750 times a day, and Europeans are at … 360 times a day,” Schmetz says.

In other words, that great lumbering giant of legislation, GDPR, which has forced more mouse clicks (to accept or deny cookies) than any other law in history, has only succeeding in halving European’s data privacy exposure.

The interesting thing, according to Schmetz, is that all of this data collection, done in the name of making ads more relevant and effective, doesn’t actually accomplish its task.

“I don’t think we would be losing that much in advertising or in machine learning if people would collect data in a way that doesn’t automatically expose the life of their users,” Schmetz says. “It’s really possible to do it. We’ve proven it many times, you know, academically, etc. it is doable. It’s just not being done because there is no reason to do it. Neither users nor governments nor anyone else is actually pushing in that direction.”

There is evidence that publishers, specifically news outlets, can earn more when omitting layers of targeting adtech (each of which takes its slice of revenue) and simply enabling contextual ads, which don’t require personal information.