Big Business Knows Us Too Well

David Holtzman, author of Privacy Lost, warns that new innovations from Google Maps and iTunes are taking notes on you

by David H. Holtzman

It has been more than two decades since 1984 and still we have no Big Brother. Even with the state-sponsored snooping that followed September 11, the idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing government is still far-fetched. Think of how easily Andrew Speaker, a man with a drug-resistant version of tuberculosis, was able to slip past alerted officials on the U.S.-Canadian border in May.

But before you relegate your well-thumbed Orwell to the conspiracy stack, keep a weather eye out for a related threat: Corporate America. Although the private sector can't take away your life and liberty the way that the public one can—it's more Big Bother than Big Brother—it can annoy and embarrass you, and rob you of some key rights just the same.

Large companies are an ever-increasing threat to individual privacy because many of them are in the business of selling information, and our personal data is a valuable commodity. Computer makers, media corporations, and telecommunication giants are assuming new roles as infomediaries, making money not only from providing information to consumers but also selling information about consumers.

Consider the Evidence

The scope of privacy abuses only increases as more personal information comes under the control of Corporate America and companies use that data for internal marketing, sales to third parties, or by acting as an ad hoc regulator for a business partner.

Consider Exhibit A, Exhibit G, and Exhibit T: Apple, Google, and AT&T.

As Apple (AAPL) changes from a computer hardware to a media sales company, it is amassing ever more valuable consumer data. The company hasn't shown a strong predilection toward protection of consumer privacy, especially when it comes to the wishes of well-heeled industrial partners—notably the music industry—whose interests are often inimical to those of Apple's end users.

In February, Chief Executive Steve Jobs published a memo called "Thoughts on Music" that advocated discontinuing the copyright-protection software that limits what users can do with music purchased from Apple's iTunes digital music store. Not long afterward, Jobs announced that, thanks to a deal with British music publisher EMI (EMI), Apple would indeed begin offering unprotected music from the online iTunes store. But soon after the release of these songs, advocacy groups discovered that buyers' names and e-mail addresses were hidden in the music downloads.

An Abuse of Trust?

I don't see the inclusion of a name and e-mail into a purchased song as a huge privacy intrusion, especially considering the song is supposed to be used only in your own digital environment. Yet the episode does call to mind scarier future scenarios in which Apple might take a more active role in helping big media stop piracy.

We Mac users have been trusting Apple with our personal information for years, giving them registration information when we bought a computer or an iPod, financial information when we wanted to buy an iTunes song, and computer configuration and document data when we used the .mac service. We have always trusted Apple, and for them to abuse our faith in this way is disturbing, to say the least.

Apple knows little about us compared with its Silicon Valley neighbor Google (GOOG). The master of Web search gleans a great deal of data on users based on how they search and surf online. And what Google does with that information could put privacy in jeopardy, says Britain's Privacy International. In its annual privacy ranking report, the advocacy group dropped Google into the lowest possible category, reserved for those companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."