http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=59976
How much do Internet companies know about us, and what do they plan to do with
the information? If only we knew.
By Brian Eule, Stanford Magazine
ASSUMING YOU POSSESS a cell phone and a computer and a credit card, the
following scenario, or something like it, might sound familiar.
Your morning begins with coffee and a bagel and the morning paper, perhaps read
on a laptop. You click on stories about Egyptian unrest, the firearms industry
and Downton Abbey. Two other websites are open on your desktop. One of them
shows your Facebook account. You notice that you've been "tagged" in a photo
from last week's poker game, in a pose that suggests one too many beers.
Meanwhile, a friend has sent you a link to an article in the Onion that
zestfully parodies a well-known senator. You "like" it.
You head out for your daily commute. At the toll booth, a Fastrak device
validates the code on your car and records the date and time of your arrival.
You stop for gas. You swipe your debit card. The pump asks for your ZIP code
and you type it in. As the 20-gallon tank fills, you pull out your smartphone
and do a quick search for a weekend flight to Chicago. Along with the flight
schedules and airfares, an advertisement appears about a local concert at the
same venue where you attended a performance last month.
In the first two hours of your day, computers have recorded that you are a
likely watcher of PBS, you drink alcohol and you have a penchant for irreverent
humor. They know you drive a large vehicle and probably have family in the
Midwest. They know when you go to work and the route you take. It's 8 a.m. and
you've already left a sizable virtual fingerprint.
Now add the dozens of other electronic transactions you make in a given
day—every website you visit, every item you purchase online, all the searches
you do, all the posts you make on social media sites—plus those of all your
friends. Multiply that by hundreds of days of Internet activity. Throw in motor
vehicle records, mortgage documents, credit scores, medical diagnoses. What
does your profile look like now?
Data about all of us lives online, in "clouds," on our web browsers and in
others' databases. Cell phones show our physical location and track the places
we have been. Websites display the address and price of home purchases, along
with the buyer and seller. Advertising agencies know the web pages we have
visited and the text we have entered online. Increasingly, and with increasing
sophistication, companies are collecting, analyzing and selling data about tens
of millions of people. And most of those people have no idea when or how it's
happening.
"I don't think that people understand all the information that's out there
about them," says Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law
School's Center for Internet and Society. "People might not think that you can
put it all together, but they're wrong. It's increasingly easy to figure out
who people are. There is a treasure trove of information out there that is
available."
The interdisciplinary CIS is helping to expose the massive asymmetry between
the average consumer's understanding and practices that might threaten their
privacy. Its scholars, along with privacy advocates in the nonprofit sector,
are pushing for more transparency and stricter industry standards in how data
is collected and used.
Concern about privacy intrusions often originates from an innocuous-sounding
source: cookies. So named because of the "crumbs" of information they collect,
cookies are codes imbedded in a computer hard drive that track web activity.
They are legal and in many ways beneficial. For example, cookies "remember"
passwords so repeat users of a site don't have to type it in every time they
return. They save user preferences and enable basic Internet conventions like a
shopping cart that makes online buying easier and less time-consuming. But a
third party, unbeknownst to the user, also can set cookies that follow that
user from site to site, gathering information about him or her. The
proliferation of this practice has spawned a new business category: data
brokers. These companies harvest public records along with web activity of all
kinds, then mash it up with algorithms designed to help clients target
potential customers with advertisements. Although individual names aren't
attached to this data, scholars say there is sufficient information to tease
out a person's identity.
"Web browsing history is inextricably linked to personal information," wrote
Jonathan Mayer, a Law School student and a PhD student in computer science, and
Stanford computer science professor John C. Mitchell, in a paper last year for
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security and
Privacy. "The pages a user visits can reveal her location, interests,
purchases, employment status, sexual orientation, financial challenges, medical
conditions, and more. Examining individual page loads is often adequate to draw
many conclusions about a user; analyzing patterns of activity allows yet more
inferences."
AT AN EXTREME, piecing together information that exists about each of us can be
used for identity theft. But that's rare in comparison to more typical concerns
regarding the lack of control over who sees what personal information, how they
use it and what decisions they base on it. Aleecia M. McDonald, director of
privacy at the CIS, notes that banks might charge a higher mortgage rate for a
customer whose friends on Facebook had negative credit events. Or, web
merchants might adjust the price of products based on a customer's ZIP code.
Much of the concern, McDonald notes, resides in the uncertainty over how all of
the information will eventually be employed.
It's not just the things they disclose that people find troubling; "it's also
this data leakage about what they do online and what they're interested in,
their intellectual history and then also their friends," McDonald says. "They
don't know where the data is going, they don't know how it's used, and they
don't know what happens 10, 20, 40, 50 years from now."
Inferences based on what a user does online and who their friends are can be
misleading. Car insurance companies already vary premiums based on
demographics, but what if a user's Internet searches also informed a risk
assessment? Taken out of context, most of us have conducted searches that might
look suspicious if revealed in raw form. Employers are allowed to ask a job
applicant to log in and show them their Facebook page during an interview. What
if they also could see your search history? Might a college reject an applicant
based on additional information that now lives online?
Earlier this year, Facebook announced a feature it called "graph search" which
allowed users to search for others who have "liked" various topics or checked
in at specific locations. Privacy advocates howled. Here was information people
might have voluntarily shared, but did not expect to be catalogued. Information
once known only to close friends might now more easily be found by
strangers—and paired with other information. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a nonprofit that champions consumers' digital rights, used the
example of a graph-search-enabled query for "People who work at Apple, Inc. who
like Samsung Mobile," information that, if shared, might put those employees in
an awkward position. For its part, Facebook is encouraging all users to revisit
their privacy settings, which locks down some of what others could find via
graph search.
Google logs massive amounts of information about its users and, "regularly
receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over
user data," according to the company's transparency reports. In the second half
of 2012, Google received requests for information on more than 33,000 users'
accounts and complied with 66 percent of those.
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2010 found that, "the nation's
50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the
computers of visitors, usually with no warning." Twelve of them, it noted,
installed more than 100.
Privacy concerns may vary by age. McDonald speculates that younger generations
might be most vigilant about protecting their privacy from their parents. The
middle generation might be most concerned with what employers or health care
providers might learn about them. Regardless of age, much of the issue centers
around control, or lack of it.
"The question, on some level, is 'Whose data is it?' " McDonald says.
And the problem isn't confined to for-profit companies. Last October, Mayer
noticed an article in the New York Times about the use of third-party trackers
by the Obama and Romney campaigns. Both campaigns claimed they had safeguards
in place to protect users' anonymity. Mayer didn't buy it. "This seemed pretty
implausible to me," he says. "It was frustrating, at this level of politics,
that they were making this claim."
So he fired up an open source platform he had created, called FourthParty, that
measures dynamic web content—sites whose offerings vary based on different
information provided by the user or the program—and monitors interactions with
web applications. Mayer had to give himself a screen name, so he went with
"Leland Stanford." Then he entered some information and tried to see what ended
up in the page codes that got passed along.
Within a day, Mayer had confirmed his hunch. On both campaign sites, personal
information—in some instances a user's name, in others an address or ZIP
code—was included in the page web address that was given to the third-party
trackers.
Mayer didn't think it was an intentional privacy breach, but he felt the
parties should have known better than to claim they could keep the data
anonymous.
Facebook presents a particular dilemma. The site is extraordinarily popular in
part because it fosters connections by inviting people to share information.
But its reach and aggressiveness in collecting user data are troubling, says
Mayer. His research indicates roughly half of web browsers are logged into
Facebook while users are visiting other pages. Each time those users visit a
page that also has a Facebook icon, the information is sent back to Facebook.
Even if the user doesn't click on that icon.
In the absence of strong controls, what are consumers to do to protect
themselves? One strategy: Pay for privacy. Start-ups such as Reputation.com
will scrub personal information from online databases for a fee. But while some
people are willing to pay, critics say consumers need better options. "Having
to pay a fee in order to engage in a retrospective effort to claw back personal
information doesn't seem to us the right way to go about this," David Vladeck,
then director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade
Commission, said at a congressional hearing in 2010.
Deleting cookies from one's computer is only a half measure. There are still
other fingerprints left behind, Mayer says. Which version of which web browser
they use, which Windows updates they have, which plugins they installed, the
order of the updates they downloaded, and so on, all create a unique trail of
sites visited. "Consumers by and large have no idea what's going on," he
asserts.
Scholars at CIS are actively working to strengthen individuals' remedies. Each
Wednesday, members of an international World Wide Web working group on tracking
protection dial in to a conference call. Their mission is to "improve user
privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences
around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements."
Representatives from academia and industry, including people from Microsoft,
Apple, Facebook, Google and Mozilla, try to agree on a set of recommendations
for the field. McDonald and Mayer both participate.
Much of the discussion stems from a relatively simple idea that Mayer and
Arvind Narayanan, a former postdoc at Stanford, now an affiliate scholar at the
CIS and professor at Princeton, helped demonstrate.
Around 2007, in response to increased tracking on the web, privacy advocates
explored a Do Not Track program that would provide website users a means of
blocking trackers. It would work much like the Do Not Call registry adopted to
protect consumers from intrusive telephone marketers. It seemed more sensible
to work from the user end, rather than having each company offer an opt-out,
but many in the industry thought it was impossible to do.
Mayer and Narayanan began writing on the subject, describing on a blog how it
would work: A header in an HTTP field, the building block of the web, would
signal the computer not to collect information, thus enabling users to opt out
of tracking of all kinds. They tried to show companies ways they could respond
to protect their businesses. It is "a simple technology that is completely
compatible with the existing web," they wrote. "We believe regulation is
necessary to verify and enforce compliance with a user's choice to opt out of
tracking." In a "Do Not Track Cookbook," which they posted online, Mayer and
Narayanan proposed limiting identifiers to each website to prevent tracking
from one place to another.
A 2010 FTC report recommended implementing a Do Not Track mechanism; several
web browsers have adopted its use, but compliance is voluntary and its
effectiveness has been limited.
UNLIKE SOME COUNTRIES that have codified a comprehensive right to privacy,
Jennifer Granick notes, the United States has no universal privacy law.
Instead, it relies on a patchwork of regulations and the Fourth Amendment,
which states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by
Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and
the persons or things to be seized."
But the Fourth Amendment applies only to intrusions from the government. And
most federal privacy statutes apply only to specific sectors, such as health
care, education or communications and therefore fail to adequately protect
personal data on the Internet. The oddest origin of such a statute relates to
video rental records and stems from the days of Robert Bork's Supreme Court
confirmation hearings.
In 1987, Michael Dolan, then a reporter for the Washington City Paper, an
alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., walked into a local video store he knew
Bork and his wife frequented and requested a list of the couple's video
rentals. The subsequent article he wrote, describing Bork based on 146 videos
he had presumably watched, did little to define the man, other than revealing a
yen for Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant. But it caused a stir among the
nation's legislators, who were suddenly concerned about their own privacy.
Within a year, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act to prohibit
"wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records" without a customer's
consent. The Act recently returned to the floor of Congress, with an amendment
that makes it easier for companies like Netflix to have consumers share their
online video viewing as a means of delivering suggestions that fit their tastes.
The law in general is still catching up to the technology. In early February,
the California Supreme Court ruled that Apple could legally require some
personal information as a means of validating users and preventing fraud.
However, the majority opinion suggested that new laws might be necessary to
adequately protect consumer privacy.
Narayanan tries to make a clear distinction between privacy research and
privacy advocacy. He believes in an individual's choice, and thus transparency
and consumer awareness are important. He also is quick to point out that
technology advancements can improve privacy options. At the start of the
privacy class he teaches each year, he shares an example.
The novel Fifty Shades of Grey might have been stigmatized by its graphic
sexual content, Narayanan tells his students, but because it first was released
as an e-book, people were able to read it on tablets or e-readers without other
people knowing. Then, when the book became popular enough that there was no
stigma attached, it was published in print.
"The narrative of technology killing privacy is, at best, dramatically
overstated," Narayanan says. "For every example of technology hurting privacy,
there's one of technology helping privacy." Another example: Self-checkout
kiosks used in some large retailers and grocery stores that allow shoppers to
make purchases without a store clerk knowing what they've bought.
These examples present an interesting paradox: While reading Fifty Shades of
Grey on a Kindle feels more private, there is still an electronic record of the
purchase. Compare that to buying it at a bookstore, with cash. A clerk might
know you like steamy novels but that's where the "record" of your purchase
ends. As technology is adopted more widely, old ways are made obsolete or, in
some cases, disappear altogether. But that limits our ability to avoid the
technology, and the attendant privacy concerns, if we chose to do so.
Solving the privacy conundrum would be easier if the solution didn't also
encroach on the ability of companies to prosper, and to deliver new and
interesting methods of entertainment, social engagement and commerce that
consumers happily embrace. The same technological developments that raise
privacy questions also add convenience to many ordinary tasks. They enable
instantaneous communication. Social media sites work because of the
participation of all of our friends, sharing photos and updates that we enjoy
receiving. What's the answer?
Control and transparency were major themes of a 2012 government report titled
"A Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" that aimed to establish "a baseline of
clear protections for consumers and greater certainty for companies." The
report stated that "Consumers have a right to exercise control over what
personal data companies collect from them and how they use it" as well as a
right "to easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and
security practices."
The report recognized and attempted to account for the benefits of data
collection and to find ways of protecting privacy without thwarting innovation.
But it warned that if companies don't adopt measures themselves, further
regulatory scrutiny is likely. Those warnings are coming true. Last July
Congress began an inquiry into data mining practices. In October, a similar
probe was launched into nine data brokers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation expects several pieces of legislation to go
before Congress over the next year, including amendments to existing bills that
would mandate a warrant for obtaining private electronic communications such as
old emails. Minnesota Sen. Al Franken recently introduced The Location
Protection Privacy Act of 2012 that would potentially prevent smartphone apps
from tracking a cell phone's location and sending it to a third party without
consent. Another major player is the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
whose president and executive director Marc Rotenberg, JD '87, has testified
before Congress on many issues related to consumer privacy.
"I think the next couple of years will be formative for the next decade after,"
CIS's McDonald says. But forecasts about how business interests and privacy
concerns ultimately will be reconciled are cloudy at best. And the proverbial
slippery slope is getting more treacherous all the time.
"I would expect that targeting advertising is just the beginning of what could
be done with this data," McDonald says. She worries "that we will look back
later on and go, 'remember when it was so simple? It was only advertising.'"
Brian Eule, '01, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
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