Google is using its popular Gmail service to build profiles
on the hundreds of millions of people who use it.
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can
more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
“Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no
delete button.” —Eric Schmidt
Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley recently
announced that they had gotten together to form a new forward-thinking
organization dedicated to promoting government surveillance reform in the name
of “free expression” and “privacy.”
The charade should have been laughed at and mocked — after
all, these same companies feed on privacy for profit, and unfettered
surveillance is their stock and trade. Instead, it was met with cheers and fanfare
from reporters and privacy and tech experts alike. “Finally!” people cried,
Silicon Valley has grown up and matured enough to help society tackle the
biggest problem of our age: the runaway power of the modern surveillance state.
The Guardian described the tech companies’ plan as
“radical,” and predicted it would “end many of the current programs through
which governments spy on citizens at home and abroad.” Laura W. Murphy,
Director of ACLU’s DC Legislative Office, published an impassioned blog post
praising tech giants for urging President Barack Obama and Congress to enact
comprehensive reform of government surveillance. Silicon Valley booster Jeff
Jarvis could hardly contain his glee. “Bravo,” he yelped. “The companies came
down at last on the side of citizens over spies.” And then added:
"Spying is bad for the internet; what’s bad for the
internet is bad for Silicon Valley; and — to reverse the old General Motors saw
— what’s bad for Silicon Valley is bad for America."
But while leading tech and privacy experts like Jarvis
slobber over Silicon Valley megacorps and praise their heroic stand against
oppressive government surveillance, most still don’t seem to mind that these
same tech billionaires run vast private sector surveillance operations of their
own. They vacuum up private information
and use it to compile detailed dossiers on hundreds of millions of people
around the world — and that’s on top of their work colluding and contracting
with government intelligence agencies.
If you step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s not
hard to see that Silicon Valley is heavily engaged in for-profit surveillance,
and that it dwarfs anything being run by the NSA.
We learned that Google had used its Street View cars to
carry out a covert — and certainly illegal — espionage operation on a global
scale, siphoning loads of personally identifiable data from people’s Wi-Fi
connections all across the world. Emails, medical records, love notes,
passwords, the whole works — anything that wasn’t encrypted was fair game. It
was all part of the original program design: Google had equipped its Street
View cars with surveillance gear designed to intercept and vacuum up all the
wireless network communication data that crossed their path. An FCC
investigation showing that the company knowingly deployed Street View’s
surveillance program, and then had analyzed and integrated the data that it had
intercepted.
Most disturbingly, when its Street View surveillance program
was uncovered by regulators, Google pulled every crisis management trick in the
book to confuse investors, dodge questions, avoid scrutiny, and prevent the
public from finding out the truth. The company’s behavior got so bad that the
FCC fined it for obstruction of justice.
The investigation in Street View uncovered a dark side to
Google. But as alarming as it was, Google’s Street View wiretapping scheme was
just a tiny experimental program compared Google’s bread and butter: a massive
surveillance operation that intercepts and analyzes terabytes of global
Internet traffic every day, and then uses that data to build and update complex
psychological profiles on hundreds of millions of people all over the world —
all of it in real time. You’ve heard about this program. You probably interact
with it every day. You call it Gmail.
Google launched Gmail in 2004. It was the company’s first
major “log in” service and was aimed at poaching email users from Microsoft and
Yahoo. To do that, Google offered one gigabyte of free storage space standard
with every account. It was an insane amount of data at the time — at least
several hundred times more space than what was being offered by Yahoo or
Hotmail — and people signed up en masse. At one point, Gmail’s limited
pre-public release invites were so desirable that at one point they fetched
over $150 on eBay.
To tech reporters Gmail’s free email service was nothing
short of revolutionary. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue wrote: “One
gigabyte changes everything. You no longer live in terror that somebody will
send you a photo, thereby exceeding your two-megabyte limit and making all
subsequent messages bounce back to their senders.”
And what about the fact that Gmail scanned your email
correspondence to deliver targeted ads?
Well, what of it?
Gmail users handed over all their personal correspondence to
Google, giving the company to right to scan, analyze, and retain in perpetuity
their correspondence in return for a gigabyte of storage, which even at that
early stage already cost Google only $2 per gigabyte per year.
Selling the contents of our private and business life to a
for-profit corporation in return for half a Big Mac a year? What a steal!
You’d be hard pressed to find a bum who’d sell out to Google
that cheap. But most mainstream tech journalist weren’t that scrupulous, and
lined up to boost Gmail to the public.
“The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are
those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are
free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google
from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it,”
wrote Pogue in 2004.
But not everyone was as excited as Mr. Pogue.
Several privacy groups, including the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, were alarmed by Gmail’s vast potential for privacy abuse.
In particular, EPIC was concerned that Google was not restricting its email
scanning activities solely to its registered user base, but was intercepting
and analyzing the private communication of anyone who emailed with a Gmail
user:
“Gmail violates the privacy rights of non-subscribers.
Non-subscribers who e-mail a Gmail user have ‘content extraction’ performed on
their e-mail even though they have not consented to have their communications
monitored, nor may they even be aware that their communications are being
analyzed,” EPIC explained at the time. The organization pointed out that this
practice almost certainly violates California wiretapping statues — which
expressly criminalizes the interception of electronic communication without
consent of all parties involved.
What
spooked EPIC even more: Google was not simply scanning people’s
emails for advertising keywords, but had developed underlying technology to
compile sophisticated dossiers of everyone who came through its email system.
All communication was subject to deep linguistic analysis; conversations were
parsed for keywords, meaning and even tone; individuals were matched to real
identities using contact information stored in a user’s Gmail address book;
attached documents were scraped for intel — that info was then cross-referenced
with previous email interactions and combined with stuff gleamed from other
Google services, as well as third-party sources…
Here’s are some of the things that Google would use to
construct its profiles, gleamed from two patents company filed prior to
launching its Gmail service:
- Concepts and topics discussed in email, as well as email attachments
- The content of websites that users have visited
- Demographic information — including income, sex, race, marital status
- Geographic information
- Psychographic information — personality type, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyle interests
- Previous searches users have made
- Information about documents a user viewed and or edited by the users
- Browsing activity
- Previous purchases
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