Web inventor and MIT professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has entered the raging controversy in Britain over the agreement of several UK ISPs to turn over their customers' browsing histories to Phorm, an Web advertising agency. "It's mine [my browsing history] - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return."
He offered the example of someone searching for and visiting sites about cancer:
"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books," he said.
While the Phorm plan is widely discussed in the UK, similar tracking in the U. S. has become widespread with scarcely any public attention. Analysis by comscore points out that just counting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace, people are subjected to one-third of a trillion "data transmission events" every month. A data transmission event is when a web page gathers information about the user and logs it onto a server.
Of course, we know from the revelations of the last several months that the information collected on these servers is readily offered in bulk and with reference to individuals by Google and others to government officials whether or not they have warrants.
How handy for government snoops. The ISPs and advertising agencies like Phorm and Double-Click collect the data on you and store it in nice, organized form on their servers. Then, to get along with government regulators, they give it away for nothing to the feds. Then the feds turn around and grant them immunity against any customer who would try to sue them for this invasion of privacy.
It's archetypal fascism--a partnership between the State and the corporate oligarchy--and no one in the government or corporate world is going to stop it.
What can you do? Web Worker Daily recommends:
Of course, there are some ways to avoid The Ever Watchful Eye of Google. You can relentlessly block cookies in your web browser. You can do all of your surfing through an anonymous proxy network. But how many people even know about these tactics, let alone use them?
We'd remind readers, however, that "anonymous" proxies are anything but. They're easily identified as proxies by servers and being rejected by more and more of them. Instead, "Elite Proxy" or VPN is the solution.