Google and Facebook make a mess of things, putting private information out in the open. This may ultimately undermine people’s trust in search and social media.

By Per Koch, Pandia

Back in the 80′s I was drafted to the Norwegian Navy and served as a Petty Officer in cryptography and communication. This was before the age of the World Wide Web and email. The main forms of military communication was VHF radio and telex!

As is the case now, information was given different classifications, from Unclassified at the one end via Restricted, Confidential and Secret to Top Secret at the other. To see a Top Secret documents you need Top Secret clearance, but even that is not enough. There is also the Need to Know principle, in essence saying that if you have no use for the information you should not be given access to it.

The reason for this is the following truth: Intelligence is more than the individual snippets of information. It is more than the sum of all the data that is available. It is about putting all these pieces of information together and turning them into a coherent narrative. This is not about the the pieces, but the complete jigsaw picture.

This means that even Unclassified information — which in isolation may pose no threat — may help the enemy gain useful information about your total defensive capability.

To give one example: An unclassified food shopping list for a Naval base can be used to ascertain the number of soldiers living there.

The web helps you merge information

The growth of the Internet, the search engines and the social web has made this insight important for all of us.

The party photo you put up on Flickr may not say much about you in itself, but if you compare the time stamp of that photo with your work calendar, it may tell your employer a lot. This was the day you called in sick. And there you are, smiling in front of the camera, with a glass of champagne in your hand.

It is so much easier to work as a private investigator these days. If you know your basic web search techniques, you can get a lot of info about a person without leaving your office.

You can play private detective yourself. Go over to Spokeo and search for a name. Spokeo will do its best to amalgamate data from various online sources.

The reason both Facebook and Google are in such pain right now is this: They believe people’s willingness to share data using various services and technologies means that they have become less worried about privacy.

This may be the case for some, but if a sufficient number of internet savvy users get worried, that worry may spread to the rest of society.

Google Buzz

Google’s clumsy launch of Google Buzz is an excellent example of this.

In order to speed up the establishment of a new social web site, Google decided to make all users of Gmail members of Google Buzz. Then they the Gmail contacts you were most often in contact with your “friends” in that network, and made your list of friends public.

An human rights activist in a totalitarian country risked having all his secret contacts displayed for all the world to see. And yes, the Chinese and Iranian secret services know how to use Google Buzz.

Facebook

Facebook is now undermining people’s trust in its willingness to keep your private information private, by making its privacy policy and its privacy settings non-transparent.

Most users probably believe that what they do on Facebook is only shared with their friends. That depends on their privacy settings, and it is getting harder and harder to understand what these settings are for each one of us.

For instance: Facebook recently launched an “I like this web page” recommendation button that, without asking Facebook users first, automatically share some of their profile information with Pandora, Yelp, Microsoft and other companies.

Facebook has also started requiring users to join public groups based on the previously private “interests” listed on their profiles.

The Facebook opt-out is complex

The New York Times puts it this way:

“The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options. “

I must admit I am seriously considering closing down my Facebook account, but hey, that is close to impossible. You see, Facebook will not delete your data, only hide it. (Although there is one carefully hidden link that may help you achieve that goal).

Google Street View and WiFi

The need for privacy goes beyond the social web.

Google has for a long time had cars driving around in cities taking photos of streets and buildings. They use these photos for Street View part of the Google Map service. Search for an address, and you can see how that street looked the last time Google was there.

Originally Google published the photos as they were. They have since agreed to blur faces and number plates.

What Google did not tell the public, however, was that these cars also map all the WiFi transmitters in the neighbourhood, including yours.

Google was using this info for helping mobile phones determine their exact location — in case the GPS system is failing or missing.

However, Google has apparently also been picking up random data transmitted via these networks.

About 600 gigabytes of data was taken off open (but not password protected) WiFi networks in more than 30 countries. Google says this was a technical mistake and that it plans to delete it all.

The WiFi scandal has caused an uproar in Germany, which sees it all as a threat to public privacy. The Germans are very sensitive about these issues. They have learned the hard way what a police state can do to a people.

Public information

Google’s excuse for tracking WiFi networks was that the WiFi network name router number is public information. If you set up a WiFi network, you must know that it will broadcast its presence to everybody in the neighbourhood. Moreover, other companies have already done something similar.

Google is missing the point. There is a huge leap from putting out your garbage can, to having someone go through it in search for your bank account number.

In this case Google’s mapping of WiFi hot spots may be considered useful and legitimate (although the storage of data transmitted is not), but the fact that Google didn’t think about the privacy implications is scary. If companies like Google and Facebook continue making this kind of mistakes, they risk undermining people’s trust in such services.

If that trust disappears, people will ultimately leave Facebook for more secure alternatives. People will stop using Gmail and other Google services. That would be a shame, because they have become useful tools in our daily lives.

Google’s attempts at rebuilding trust

The main reason for Google leaving China was most likely that having Chines hackers going into Gmail accounts would kill the trust users have in Google. But leaving China does not help if Google itself is not able to think through its own actions.

Google has already started encrypting Gmail messages. Next week it will launch an encrypted version of Google search. I guess my old Navy bosses would approve.

Moreover, yesterday the Google Blog announced that Google will stop their Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

Google is clearly getting the message. The Google Blog says:

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

Facebook does not get it

Ethan Beard, director of Facebook’s developer network does not get it, though. He says that “the response from users speaks very, very loudly that they love what we’re doing.”

He argues that Facebook users don’t use the site to store a bunch of private information they don’t want others to see:

“The reason that people use Facebook is to share information with their friends and to connect with things that are important to them.”

Fine, but what happens when they find out that they are sharing a lot of these information with total strangers?

Traffick: ‘Sharing is Not an Inherently Private Activity’. Really. Really??!

Search Engine Land: Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re Sharing To The World?