After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the [...]
If you want to imagine the world your children are heading into, imagine this: imagine living in a world where everything everybody says or has ever said to you or about you is available online for anyone to find. In that world there are no secrets. At any point in time I can find out who your friends are and I can find out whatever I want to about them as well. Imagine how much I would know about you and about what you do. It’s coming because the internet wants this. Not because it’s evil, finding your every secret and making it public, but because it wants to show you more stuff you might like. It’s all about targeted, personalised and customised experiences. And by experiences I mean advertising. It’s called Social Search. Google it.
It makes sense because your social circle has things in common with you, such as your interests, your lifestyle choices and your income level. You probably have conversations right now when you see your friends and colleagues, recommending what to buy and where to shop. The internet has broadened that social circle beyond people you physically meet and has given you new ways in which to have conversations. It’s those conversations that the internet wants to make sense of, to make sure your surfing experience is more relevant to you, more personalised, more likely to get you to spend.
So is this world we’re heading into really so bad for our children? The fact is that I do have a lot in common with my friends, and a more personalised internet experience makes sense because if I’m going to have to see adverts, at least make them relevant. And it’s not like my social circle is a secret, I’m proud of my friends, proud to be associated with them. So go ahead. Link me to my friends. Profile me. Profile my family.
But it could be bad, really, really bad. We can only begin to imagine how that information will be used in the future, but I’m sure that advertising will only be one part of the story. Employers and Universities will be able to screen applicants based on their entire life history, not just the academic and professional history we provide, the resume as we think about it may even cease to exist, because as the x-files said “the truth is out there”. They will be able to work out what ‘type’ of person you are and whether that means you are likely to be a success, or not. In a similar vein insurance companies will be able to profile you based on what they uncover about you, about your family history, and not what we tell them on the forms we fill out. Whatever the end use of the information is there will certainly be companies compiling information on you, and trying to sell it, and someone will buy it to gain some form of advantage.
The first step towards this has already been taken, the information capture mechanisms (Search Engines, Email, Social Networks and Instant Messaging Applications) are in place and we’re all adding to their database of content stored against our user names every single day. The next steps are to connect it, index it and start searching it. That’s more or less happening as I write. And the internet has no delete button. It’s all their forever. That information is immortal. Everything you have written and continue to write is sat somewhere, waiting. 2 trillion people sending emails, 2 billion typed Google searches every day, 400 million people providing instant updates about themselves, 1 million blog posts every day. All stored, eternal, indexed, containing information about you.
It’s one thing to compromise your own privacy but how much of what you write contains information about your children?
I think this is an important topic for parents because we’re all on here talking about our children, and then allowing our children to talk about themselves. We act like the internet makes us anonymous, but it does not, it does exactly the opposite, and we need to make sure our children understand that. We need to be careful when we broadcast about our families. We need to think of the internet as a recording device, something that saves everything we say. We need to make sure that the information we give out will not create problems for our children in the future.
Of course not everything is damaging. There’s an obvious difference between putting a cute photo of your kids online and telling the internet that their grandparents died of cancer; one is a cute photo, the other is an indication of a genetic tendency to cancer.
I don’t have the answer. I don’t have any real tips yet. I’m thinking about it and I’m working on it but for now all I can really offer is a word of caution. When you type you are providing information forever, you don’t know who will use it or how, but be sure that before you hit submit it’s not something that could impact your children when someone Google’s their name in 20 years.
Tags: ecommerce, Parenting, technology
December 10th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I’m a forty year old Single parent of a two year old with two jobs and 8 credits of school. In my writing class, I got an assignment that sent me into the blogosphere for the first time. I’ve spent five hours feeling tortured by the colossal waste of time reading these blogs has been. Until I read yours. Thanks