I’ll be returning to looking at the whole take back parliament thing later, but I’m still digging there so meantime I thought I’d pull together a few bits on something that I’m more familiar with. The Devils Kitchen has a link to an excellent article on the Panopticon Parliament which coming so close on the heals of Charlotte Gore’s article about the new front in the battle for liberty – prompted me to revisit an old bug bear of mine. Whilst we’re fighting tooth and nail (or at least letter and blog) to curtail the state intrusion into our lives, we’re at the same throwing our data at private companies (when they’re not just taking it), whilst demanding decentralisation of our authorities we opt to use an increasingly small number of providers for our internet activities. Now I do know there is a difference in that we can at least notionally choose who to use on-line with far more freedom than we can change our laws and government, and there’s nothing stopping someone becoming the next facebook or google. However these on-line behemoths don’t exactly go out of their way to let us know what they’re up to, and with so much data concentrated in so few hands it does make the governments job an awful lot easier if they chose they wanted to get their hands on that data.

So perhaps it’s time we looked at once more decentralising the internet (as it was designed to be) and avoid making the same mistakes on line as have been made in the real world, perhaps it’s time to take back some control and independence whilst it’s still fairly easy.

If you don’t think this is a significant issue, let’s just look at a few recent “mistakes” made by google and facebook. Not so long ago the google toolbar was caught transmitting data when disabled, more recently Google street view cars were found to have been collecting wifi network traffic when they only intended to collect enough data to uniquely identify everyone’s wifi router (they’ve currently stopped deleting that data as it may be evidence) and to round it up facebook have been giving user names to advertisers. So aside from that sort of mistake there is the designed centralisation of internet usage that companies like google push for as part of their business plans – the more they know about us the more adverts they can sell. So let’s consider just how much data google could amass if they felt like it or were asked to do so. There’s the obvious data source of the google search engine, but if you avoid that how many pages do you visit that are signed up to google analytics and so are passing back your data to google anyway? Of course if you use google mail, or blogger then you’ve consented to let google have your data and use it according to their dynamic privacy policy, and if you use google wave don’t count on anything you say ever being deleted. But even that is just the tip of the iceburg if you choose to use the google DNS servers then google can track everything you even thing about looking at, and I would ponder how long till those servers are used by default in some mobile phones and home ADSL boxes. If you’re logged into any google service then in theory all this data can be linked.

But tying this back to my recent subject of interest you don’t even need to be google to track people to this extent, if you were running a popular on-line campaign and providing icons or widgets for people to put on their websites you could get a reasonable amount of tracking data. The EFF have recently demonstrated that your browser may be uniquely identifiable even if you change IP address, and that data can be combined with the browsing history your browser gives away. I’m not of course suggesting that anyone is doing this, and I do use quite a few of these services myself. Interacting with people on line without touching these services is these days quite difficult, and if you’ve many less paranoid friends the inconvenience of not using these services is distinct. So just like in the panopticon prison where the fear of being observed tends to make you confirm, the desire to not be socially excluded acts as a pressure to sign up to numerous data collectors and give away data bit by bit in exchange for more pretty icons. Foursquare is a wonderful example of this by letting you call yourself “mayor of X” they’ve got people to voluntarily track themselves in the real world.

So what to do about this, well as I’ve said before run your own servers, and encourage the move to decentralised services. Why have accounts on every networking site when OpenID (much as I lambast it) or it’s like could allow for self control of login data, if the work being done at OStatus gets adopted then independent sites can get all the benefits of social networking but in a distributed fashion. Trying to make this a reality is the Diaspora project* (hat tip SamizData). If such things get supported then we can use whatever independent provider we choose or even run our own home servers (You can now get a plug computer that is quite usable as a low traffic server). With Governments getting less and less keen on not having the internet firmly regulated, the only sensible direction to preserve our current freedom of association and expression is away from large global providers of social networking and other services. Or we can look at the situation where to even print something on the printer on our desk we send it to google first, or perhaps to a government archive instead purely for our own good. Ultimately the choice I suppose is if we want to pay for the services we own with cash or with a loss of privacy so that people can make the money to run those services by selling our details to someone who will pay cash.

* Disclosure I’ve chipped in to support the Diaspora project.

Update There’s also an article about how the private sector are invading our privacy over at Big Brother Watch

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