Consumer privacy groups are upset that ISPs (such as your local cable company) are designing tools to track web viewing habits and to sell this information to advertisers. Web tracking has been around for a decade by individual sites, and then by collections of hundreds of sites known as ad networks. But Internet Service Providers give you the modem by the wall and thus see everything you do. If they could mine all that data, think of the targeting potential ... and privacy risks.
Except all these concerns have a single flaw: You now actually need people to track things for you.
Think of it. What would happen if your computer crashed, you lost all your bookmarks, all your contacts, all those emails with distant relatives or colleagues cc'd? Memorization has become an obsolete skill set; most U.S. consumers now have cell phones, and so the number of phone numbers in our heads has fallen from hundreds to perhaps a handful.
If you protest, please answer two questions:
1. Who was the second president of the United States?
2. What is your mother's cell phone number?
You don't know. You don't need to know. The answers are lodged in Google and your smart phone.
We hit the memory brick wall ourselves this week, while on vacation in Maine, when we realized the friends' computers we borrowed didn't have all our saved passwords and bookmarks. Suddenly pulling information from the web was hard -- so many breadcrumbs were stocked in our home Mac computer, the trail to knowledge was now fogged.
Do humans now need others to remember things on their behalf? New Zealand professor James Flynn has found that human IQs are rising, but our newfound intelligence is now focused on abstract reasoning. Old pragmatic knowledge skill sets such as rote memorization are falling away, as we learn to search and make cognitive leaps but require information tools to fill in the gaps.
So perhaps the ad targeting privacy people have it all backwards. We are all leaving click-streams in almost any device or store we touch today, so thinking we have privacy is a myth anyway. We all use Google, which invades other content sites, scans their knowledge and posts results without a please or thank-you. We all pay bills; skip a few and then apply for a loan, and you'll see how carefully organizations are tracking you. And it is all a good thing ... because after all, someone else has to remember what we want.
Photo: Tokyo Lunch
