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Don't Google Me: Why Online Privacy Breaches Are Only Going To Get Worse

How comfortable are you putting your personal information online?

Do you trust Facebook to keep your secrets? Would you hand over your medical records to Google for safekeeping?

I have to admit that I wouldn't - regardless of who’s handling my information. And my reasons have little to do with Google “screwing up” on collecting our Wi-Fi information with its Street View cars, or Facebook security holes exposing our live chats with our friends, to name a couple of many online security blunders.

Even if these privacy blunders didn’t happen (and unfortunately they always will), my mistrust is with the inherent nature of information in electronic format and the speed at which this information can travel.  This double-edged sword has done wonders to connect the world - but can also be very damaging.

You may be surprised (or perhaps not so much) to hear that in the UK 20% of divorce claims now cite Facebook, with "the most common reason seeming to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to." Or that Facebook has had to introduce a child safety “panic button” after it was alleged that a 17-year-old girl was murdered by a sex offender posing as a teenage boy that she met on Facebook. Should this panic button really make parents more comfortable with their children chatting with strangers online? Will Facebook’s never ending changes to privacy controls really help you segment your social circles to more closely mimic real life, so you don’t share certain details with certain people you'd rather not share with?

Google’s even taking a shot at “fixing” this problem. The problem they think being that in today’s social networks there is no distinction between different groups of friends and that everyone online has simply been referred to as a “friend” up until this point (my guess is they’re introducing Google Me to try to change that) and thus inherently creating privacy concerns. However, I’m going to bet that trying to further divide and safeguard user information online by breaking up “friends” into different social groups will cause even further security/privacy issues by introducing more complexity.  What if someone accidentally gets assigned to a wrong social group? Or even worse, someone in your trusted social group turns out to be a bad apple and distributes your private information to the rest of the Internet? What if someone who is your friend today, isn’t your friend tomorrow, and you forget to disconnect them online?

These controls only give us a false sense of security.  The only way to be sure that your information will be kept private online is to keep it offline.  We can’t for any second think that our digital information is safe in the hands of any company online. We need to always be double-checking our credit reports, changing our passwords, and Googling our own names - this is the new reality of our privacy.

Even in places we thought we had complete privacy online, like behind the veil of an anonymous news comment the rules are changing.  No longer can you voice your opinion without a name to it on the Buffalo News site.  In the next couple of weeks users on their site will be accountable for their comments and will have an extra setup in account creation that will verify their identity. For those users of this site who may be unaware of the implications of this, they could find their name attached to their comments, independent of their knowledge, in Google search results – potentially exposing them to future employers, family and friends.

Maybe it’s taking some time to adjust, but I already find it quite uncomfortable when I visit a new website and it already knows which of my friends also like what I’m looking at without my opting into sharing this information explicitly.  Will this new realm of socially-architected sites create more value, or more privacy chaos? I think a little bit of both.

What is clear is that it’s safe to assume that any information on the Internet about you (or your customers), regardless of whether it is protected by a username and password, could potentially be compromised.
 
So limit your own exposure and those of your customers online and make security and privacy an evolving priority on your agenda, not a bandage solution after a mishap. 

P.S. Drop a comment below while it's still anonymous!

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