When Google announced its Gmail email service two years ago, a lot of people figured the company was joking. After all, the press release was circulated on April Fool's Day, and Google had been known to offer up the occasional gag, like saying it was starting a research center on the moon.
More importantly, the business proposition seemed preposterous. Nobody believed that consumers would tolerate Google's plan of having its computers scan an individual's emails and then deliver advertisements to him or her based on the emails' contents. Google, of course, wasn't kidding. Two years later, Gmail has tens of millions of users, and the company continues to add new features.
But the incredulity prompted by Gmail's introduction underscores the web's knotty privacy problem, according to participants at the recent 2006 Wharton Technology Conference. Consumers say they want privacy online although they often behave in ways that contradict those statements by, for example, posting intensely personal information and photos on public websites. Companies insist that they will protect privacy, although they sometimes fail to do so. And everybody is wary of increased government regulation; indeed, some people worry more about potential government misconduct than about corporate abuse. "In a world of photo traffic tickets and warrantless searches, what Google does with my personal information doesn't bother me," quipped conference panelist Gil Brodnitz, a partner at Accenture.
Debating online privacy isn't merely a philosophical exercise. Companies collect reams of information about visitors to their websites and about their customers' web-surfing ways. You may be able to hide your visits to offbeat, or off-color, websites from your spouse, but you can't hide them from Google and Yahoo. And governments at all levels have shown an increasing hunger for that kind of information. In March, for example, Google squared off with the U.
[continue]
Page 1 of 6
> >>