BrainTrust Query: How Do You Like Your Internet - Insecure or Secure?
There is no doubt that online retailers have learned out a lot about shoppers as they click around their online stores. Not only their purchases, but the items they browse but decide not to buy provide potential insight. Social networking sites provide direct linkage between users, their family and friends, and their online activity. And there are internet services that monitor user activity across multiple sites. This detailed monitoring of online activity is enabling more accurate targeted promotions than were ever previously possible.
Concurrently, more and more companies are moving to cloud computing. They are putting all their company software services on "the cloud" because it greatly reduces their cost and maintenance issues, and improves communication between remote users. Backup and recovery costs are also reduced as the cloud vendor provides these services for many clients. The chief concern of cloud users is security. Security references the continuity and integrity of the cloud-based services, but also means freedom from prying eyes. Users want to know that the data they share and store on the cloud cannot be read or modified by others.
The FCC and Congress have begun looking into the consumer privacy issues surrounding internet activity. They are considering rules and regulations that would ensure consumers have the option to opt out of various monitoring processes. Right now the extent of this discussion is targeted at browser options to limit tracking of browser activity. I am not aware of any discussions restricting retailers from following shoppers while "within" their online stores or providing any kind of security for email activity. Right now, unless you have made special arrangements to use encryption features, your email is being sent in readable text.
A recent series in the Wall Street Journal called "What They Know" has been describing the various intelligence gathering services that monitor online activity. One of the recent activities described was "deep packet inspection." This involves looking at the individual packets of internet traffic that flow through an internet service provider (ISP). Even if the data is encrypted, the ISP is able to interpret the headers because the headers are in readable text so the packet can be properly routed. At the least, a curious ISP can see everyone a user is talking to; at worst they can actually read the content of each packet that is not encrypted.
The truth is that it's probable nothing on the internet can ever be completely secure. But just as WikiLeaks has revealed how dangerous it is to allow open access to private communications, a certain amount of individual privacy seems appropriate on the internet. So this is the conundrum: a less secure internet enables greater intelligence gathering but also opens individuals to more monitoring. A more secure internet provides greater privacy, but may make it difficult or illegal to gather certain kinds of intelligence (although the discussion of making anything on the internet illegal is rife with enforcement issues). Pick your poison.
Discussion Question: How would you prefer your internet: insecure or secure? Should certain tracking capabilities, be outlawed, even if they are essential to internet marketing?