Information is the price we pay for searching the web

TECHNOLOGY experts have said that the public has to show greater caution about the personal information they are handing to internet companies following revelations about the extent of data that search engine giant Google harvests from its users.

The debate surrounding internet privacy opened up again this week when the company announced a change in its privacy settings and that it planned to share information across its search, Gmail and YouTube platforms.

A new facility on Google’s site has also given its 350 million account holders a chance to see the personal “profile” it has built up about them – detailing individual user interests, but also estimating their age, gender and nationality.

The information is gathered through the site’s algorithm, the mathematical equation that powers the search engine, but also tracks and collates the websites users visit.

The information, however, is extremely valuable to advertisers – online spending on advertising is expected to reach £25.13 billion this year, while for the first time businesses spend more on online ads than on advertising in magazines and newspapers.

Despite the increasing sophistication of its information gathering, Google’s profiles have proved it is not exactly precise – with some finding their sex swapped, age wildly inaccurate and nationality wrong.

Tom Royal, of ComputerActive magazine, said that he checked his Google profile and discovered that he was a “65-year-old man living in Alabama”. He said that while it he did not feel the practice of information harvesting was sinister in intent, people needed to be more aware of it.

“For some people there’s going to be a shock that they know that much about them, but to be absolutely fair it’s not just Google that does this, just about everything on the internet works this way,” Royal said.

“There are advertising networks who make their money working out who you are, what you want to buy and then they try to sell it to you.

“The other side is that we’ve come to expect a lot from the internet, there are all these amazing services that we’re offered for free, and there is a quid pro quo which is it’s not really free. Everything you get on the internet, you get by exchanging your information for it.”

Royal said that users had to become “more savvy” and “think more deeply” about what they were giving away to internet firms when they clicked the “accept terms of use” button on a web site.

He added, though, that it was virtually impossible to avoid leaving a trail of some sort when using the internet that advertisers would be able to pick up and use.

Rainey Reitman, activism director for privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, claimed that the situation was unique in history. “Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day,” he said. “There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today.”

Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering, said: “Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web.”