The gradual transformation of the web into an ultra-personalized, corporate-owned social space in the cloud has raised more than a few legitimate concerns about data privacy. Google, for obvious reasons, has always been one of the top cheerleaders for this metamorphosis. Touting a fresh new privacy policy that allows data about you from all of their services to coalesce, they’ve recently been particularly bullish about rendering that increasingly realistic digital portrait of you that lies stuffed away in their servers. It has led us again to question: How much are we comfortable with our machines knowing about us? How much is our privacy really worth? With their new program, Google is now asking those questions quite directly, and preceding them with dollar signs. Are we all on the verge of making our own information age Faustian bargains?
That all depends on whether you think $25 in Amazon gift cards is appropriate compensation for surrendering your online privacy. The program, called Screenwise, is putting that on the bargaining table (at a rate of 5 Amazonian bucks every 3 months) in exchange for you agreeing to install a browser extension that sends all of your browsing data — the websites you visit and how you use them — directly to Big G. But even more curious is another, less publicized option that posits installing actual hardware — a nondescript black box — as a replacement internet router.
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The box purportedly does a much more extensive job of monitoring usage data in your home network, and rewards users (currently limited to members of Knowledge Networks, an online survey and data-mining outfit) with more substantial amounts: $100 to sign up, plus $20 for each additional month of participation. According to an anonymous tip sent to Ars, the data will be shared with third parties such as “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks,” and will be personally identifiable unless secure / private browsing methods such as https were used. Thankfully, Google’s contract is non-binding (you can quit whenever you want) and they have announced in a statement that all participants have “complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel.”
Google may be just now testing the waters of dollars-for-data deals with users, but the strategy isn’t anything new. Are these kinds of monetary reward systems the next logical step for the free service-for-data model used by Facebook and others? Perhaps in time, when the next privacy-invading pact is forged, we’ll wonder why the idea ever even bothered us.
