Social Networks Face Growing Pressure Over Privacy

Several recent online privacy gaffes have led governments to show increased interest in regulating privacy settings for Internet-based services – a move that analysts say Google is particularly against.

Ovum yesterday issued a research note saying the recent privacy debacles from the likes of Google and Facebook are raising public awareness of the Internet giants’ reliance on our data to make their money, as well as the liberties being taken with our privacy.

But Mark Little, principal digital media analyst in Ovum’s Consumer Telecoms research practice, wrote that Google is against regulation, fearing the start of an opt-in bandwagon that will diminish its ability to freely access people’s and companies’ data.

The analyst pointed to the public privacy outcry that followed the introduction of Google Buzz in February. The social networking addition to Google’s Gmail service set profile and networking defaults based on email contact lists without prior consent.

And many Gmail users complained that their privacy had been violated, particularly because Google had provided no clear way to opt out of profile and ‘friend’ information being posted publicly.

Internet firms make privacy assumptions

“Google presumed, as all social networks rather primitively seem to, that your email contacts are all homogeneous ‘friends’ rather than a spectrum of business and personal acquaintances that we wish to treat very differently,” said Little. He said the Internet giant is now lobbying hard against opt-in regulation that might allow users to opt in to new privacy settings.

Meanwhile Facebook is also facing increasing privacy scrutiny.

“It is using its own scare tactics by picking only those example contexts that make an opt-in method look completely impractical, such as the setting of cookies on entering a website,” which may impair the user experience by requiring them to click through dozens of cookie acceptance requests.

The question is not whether governments should ensure user opt-in by default, added Little, but how. “We believe that, for the sake of the consumer’s privacy and Internet experience, any first regulatory step should not be about force feeding opt in or defending the current opt-out methodology, but about enforcing a satisfactory level of transparency and control as an essential first phase of regulation.”

In this way, he suggested users could then start to learn and understand where their data goes and how it is used. This could be achieved by recommending an opt-in approach to data sharing as best practice, as opposed to enforcing it.

Either way, Little said “we can’t escape the fact that the recent appalling privacy debacles have set the opt-in regulatory bandwagon running” and predicted “intense pressure” soon on Internet giants for more transparency and personal data controls.