Our Privacy: What Privacy?

In BetaNews today: Google Wants Our Web History? C'mon, don't they already have it or at least enough, more than many of us are comfortable with. Yet once giants become giants, consumers start having less votes and less choices, i.e., Microsoft.

Try telling an average consumer who owns a PC that their only other choice is Linux. Less choice, less support, yet more chaos, more time fixing things that should have been fixed before we pay for them. You scream, they tell you its not their fault. "It's a software conflict."

And when its potentially software, they tell you that "perhaps something is wrong with your PC OR its not their software, its a conflict with another piece of software they don't support." So you're left helpless, frustrated and pressured into buying expensive and confusing warranty add-ons.

The norm that we now hear is that something shouldn't last for longer than a couple of years anyway and that a newer model will make some of what you're using obsolete and useless anyway.

While we have an increasing number of online resources to access information, read reviews, participate in forums and comments threads, I still feel ill-informed and helpless at times. It is still up to me to proactively find information on my own, whether its software, hardware or my online activity, which could be a social networking site, new email or IM feature, or a newly discovered online site to buy things I care about.

Outside, skirting on the edges of all of these things that I actively engage in online is privacy. With privacy concerns growing and becoming an ongoing conversation -- at least in my Silicon Valley circles -- my fear is that something is going to hit soon that will be much larger than the AOL mishap.

Google's new feature, called Web History, is apparently an expanded version of the company's previous Search History offering. The upside for users who want to scroll back through their history is that they can view everything they have searched for, not just websites, but also graphics, imagines, video, etc. According to this report, "every URL will be stored and indexed within Google's massive infrastructure so users don't have to keep a history on their PC."

Yikes, just what I want........my entire personal history of every aspect of what I'm interested in and do on the web in the privacy of my home or office accessible by Google and perhaps others down the road after this becomes normal behavior....our new definition of.......

All it takes is a friendly marketing campaign to make people feel secure. Then, they're addicted to 'this new behavior,' i.e., deposits into ATM machines, saved financial and ordering data on Amazon and eBay, transactions on Fidelity Online, department store sites, etc.

Banking and finance somehow feels a little different, even though it is potentially more dangerous. Someone somewhere knows all of our bank account amounts, a finite sum of sorts. In the Web History model, the data becomes an account of every 'personal' aspect about you.

Think about what people search for! It spans from health, sometimes sensitive health queries that may help a family member in trouble, financial, dating, divorce, porn, education TO all of your personal passions and interests.

At least Google has been listening to the privacy debate, for Web History is not activated by default, and your search history is not stored without your permission. That said, a little publicity and marketing campaign to tout all the benefits and strongly encourage users to sign up could swing the pendulum in their favor.

Soon, like Gmail and other services like it, it will become the trendy thing to do and be default, people will automatically click the 'sure, go ahead,' track everything option. Soon, it will become as automatic for people as storing their credit card numbers and passwords as they quickly click 'remember this' when they browse or buy online. Soon, everything will be stored in the clouds, Google's clouds.

What a data mining goldmine for the Googles of this world and others who can really benefit from such personalized private data on consumers for all kinds of things we haven't even begun to realize yet. Things that may not even exist in our 2007 worlds. Something to think about. Something I hope we all think about seriously as this ongoing debate continues.