Published April 26, 2000
A Boston, Massachusetts Internet-based company wants you to surrender your privacy rights. Announcing their launch in May, 2000, Predictive Networks intends to garner partners that will collectively track your online activities.
Their plan is to sell information about you to their subscribers, creating a new revenue source for Internet Service Providers (ISP). Predictive is also soliciting big commercial e-commerce sites and Internet backbone providers to accept online orders only from those who participate in their plans.
“This is the biggest threat I’ve seen in a long time to individual privacy online,” writes Dr. Nick Lawrence of Lawrence Technologies, Dallas, TX. “Worse, they are apparently well-funded. I think it’ll take legislation to stop this, and it should be stopped!”
The potential harm is that a pipeline of data about you, with the blessings of your ISP, will flow to unseen computer repositories owned by Predictive, their financiers, and partners. Their motive is greed, immense international profits without compensation to you.
The first target is the free-email, free-Web accounts that you may use or have heard about. They brand unwanted advertisements in your correspondence, impose unblinking banner ads, and will soon track your online activities.
Lauren Weinstein of Vortex Technology, (CA) in his Internet Privacy Forum writes, “We’re on the verge of starting down the slippery slope to this end right now. Your every move on the Web, including the sites that you visit, the keywords that you enter into search engines, and so on, are all shipped off to a third party.”
The $8M financing for Predictive, and its president/founder Devin Hosea, comes from “Battery Ventures, L.P., in information technologies, plus other Wall Street investment firms.”
The Predictive Networks site of nonspecific rhetoric reads like a freshman’s attempt at resume-writing. For example:
“We have developed a revolutionary infrastructure-based content delivery platform that enhances users’ online Internet experience by delivering highly personalized, custom-tailored information. [We] leverage the Web’s rich data streams to deliver custom tailored content.”
They claim to be “blazing a new trail in content delivery ...of highly targeted, rich multimedia messages to the exact audiences you desire.” Their only product is information about your online habits.
Predictive Networks collects and archives all manner of data. From this repository a smaller set of information about you is extracted that they call Digital Silhouettes. The Digital Silhouettes are assigned an identification number, which is cross-referenced back to Predictive Networks’ database for their purposes. The Digital Silhouettes are then reported to their subscribers. Predictive Networks contends that a user’s privacy is not violated because the Digital Silhouettes are anonymous.
Without mention, Predictive expects a grant of trust that the information they extract and retain about you will remain confidential. Who has access? Only their employees, financiers, and partners, which is a great number of people indeed.
Are you comfortable with untold multitudes knowing where you shop, what newspaper articles you read, to whom you correspond and on what subjects? Is anonymity still important?
“Opting-out is an option,” they insist, but doing so “may affect your Internet service and/or Internet service rate.” Also the opt-out or refusal to opt-in will result in refusal of your ISP to grant you service. If this is an option, where is the benefit/consideration to the uncompensated Internet users?
You can review your Digital Silhouette only once each six months, and must pay them $50 for each additional report. It will be emailed to you, but only if you divulge your anonymous ID number and password (an abhorrent privacy violation). The response is not immediate; expect ten business days for the request to be reviewed.
Weinstein writes, “This can rapidly degrade into a coercive situation. Users who do not wish to participate will be forced to pay ever higher rates simply to maintain the same level of privacy and non-tracking that they had in the first place.”
Presumably it’s okay, because you, the consumer, do not care. The pretense is that it’s anonymous, that these are nice people, to be trusted, and snooping is good, they say.
The Predictive Networks’ Privacy Policy reads like a screaming warning siren and waving red-flags. They will:
· “analyze URL click-stream data, such as web pages visited, date and time of visit.” They monitor “subscriber behavior.”
· “retain key words from Internet searches, and also gather data about a subscribers’ response to messages and content.”
· “include specifications about the subscriber’s computer, such as processor type, browser plug-ins and available memory.”
· “require subscribers to furnish their ISP username, email address and password; that data will not be associated with the Digital Silhouette.”
· “match the ISP username with the Digital Silhouette ID number for customer service purposes.”
· “maintain a separate record of Digital Silhouette requests for accounting and billing purposes.” Writing to them does initiate another record of you, and your views.
· “digitally silhouette only Internet subscribers that are 13 years of age or older. However, it is not possible for us to confirm this fact.”
· “maintain ownership of all the Digital Silhouettes although some of our partners may be allowed access to aggregated data compiled.”
· “will work with a third party arbiter,” not the courts, “should a privacy-related issue arise that cannot be resolved.”
· “reserves the right to change or modified its privacy policy as necessary from time to time.”
People for Internet Responsibility; and Committee on Computers and Public Policy are also very attentive to this masked collusion.
“We still have the chance,” says Weinstein, “to say that our personal information is our own and that our Web browsing behavior is private. We may yet be able to successfully assert that we won’t be manipulated, coerced, or otherwise bribed.”
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Web Links:
http://www.pfir.org
http://www.predictivenetworks.com/home.html
http://www.vortex.com/