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Aaron Williamson, one of my friends and colleagues at the SFLC, put up a great piece yesterday running through the various panoptic services that google offers. It is well put and worth reading in full. Unfortunately, Aaron’s site requires registration in order to leave comments so I’m going to respond here instead and let Planet NYC’s feed pull together the discussion.

Aaron makes reference to a couple of points that are key, both in critiquing Google’s specific practices, and in picking up the discussion from last time.

The first, Paul Ohm’s piece “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization “, does the same thing to the field of information sharing that an expose that condoms don’t work at stopping STDs would do to the field of Sexual health medicine.

Professor Ohm documents the field of “Information reidentification”, and that field’s success in countering so called “anonymization” techniques used to remove the personally identifying bits of information (name, address, SSN, etc.) from things like your medical history or web search history before releasing that information to the public.

In a nutshell, “anonymization” is really just obfuscation; the data we are collecting about people is so rich and precise that we can take supposedly anonymous records and fill in all the missing information by fitting the record into all the rest of what we know. This should be a basic piece in discussions of our digital lives and public policy, but it has gotten almost no coverage since the initial publication.

The second point I want to talk about is that this is not about Google. This is not personal. It is not fueled by some thought-less hatred. We talk about Google and Facebook in these discussions, just as we talk about Apple in discussions of closed vs. free software, not because we have fanboyish love for a different team but because they are the most successful at popularizing practices we are concerned about.

This is a structural critique, just as arguing that banks shouldn’t be allowed to gamble with other people’s money is a structural critique. If you want to talk about whether particular organizations, whether that is Goldman Sachs or Facebook have been malfeasant, or behaved with a lack of respect for the interests of their customers, that is a different discussion.

I spent a year trying to write these posts around the theme of “Towards a Free Facebook” before realizing that the biggest problem with Facebook is how much they have popularized unsafe data systems. That’s what this is actually about.