This puts users in a difficult position – do you use potentially inferior services to maintain some semblance of privacy, or sacrifice the confidentiality of your data for the sake of ease and convenience?
Before Google and Apple pissed off the suits in Washington, it had announced that sites using the encrypted HTTPS protocol would be rewarded with better placement in the SERPs. However, the inclusion of HTTPS as a ranking signal was revealed as little more than lip service by Google at this year’s SMX East conference.
As Search Engine Land reported, Google’s Gary Illyes said that the HTTPS ranking signal affected only approximately 1% of all searches. He added that only 10% of all indexed sites used HTTPS, but that around 30% of front-page results made use of the protocol.
Although it’s a step in the right direction for Google, the true impact of HTTPS as a ranking signal remains negligible. Bing’s Vincent Wehren, however, recently stated that HTTPS will not affect placement in the SERPs at all – way to go, Bing.
Google’s desire to become the “Star Trek” computer is no secret. The folks at Mountain View have invested billions of dollars into R&D projects that will revolutionize the world as we know it. Unfortunately, such advances come at great cost, namely our ability to inhabit today’s exciting online environment and retain some semblance of privacy.
Every single advance in search technology is predicated on users relinquishing their online privacy. After all, Google cannot anticipate what we want before we want it without delving into our browsing histories, social media profiles, and even online purchasing habits.
Even people who construct online personas or carefully monitor their social media usage in an attempt to maintain their privacy have nowhere to hide. Companies such as IBM are leveraging the power of big data and increasingly sophisticated analytics technology to infer even more about people than they already know.
For example, IBM’s proprietary social media analytics technology can determine, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, an individual’s personality type based on a sampling of just 200 tweets. Even publicly available archived data can be used to construct detailed psychographic profiles of people, as a study – which only accessed archived data from defunct social media network Friendster – recently demonstrated.
One of the most common arguments made by anti-privacy advocates (including the government and law enforcement agencies) is that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Although there are literally dozens of reasons why this position is worse than ridiculous, the simplest is also the best. As noted cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier noted, the “nothing to hide” fallacy is based on the mistaken premise that privacy exists to mask wrongdoing, when nothing could be further from the truth.
