The Long Con

“If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” ~ Matt Damon, The Rounders

When Vint Cerf was designing TCP/IP he did not think twice about the ramifications of it's use and abuse by the commercial enterprise, ethics were not in consideration at that time, just a protocol for communicating between computers in a resilient fashion.(n.a. 2000)ⁱ, When Tim Bern s Lee was engaging in the development of HTTP and the “Hyper Media Experiment” in 1989 at CERN his desire was to develop a system that would enable global commutation with the use of Text, Video, Audio and any digital artifacts that might be created with a computer, in 1990 he created the firs web server and client.(w3, 2001)ⁱⁱ

We may argue that these ethical people created an ecosystem whose behavior is no longer deterministic or positive but profit driven and potentially dangerous. The world wide web as it exists today according to the LANDER project as implemented by CAIDA contains 4,294,967,296 unique hosts as of 2007. (CAIDA, 2007)ⁱⁱⁱ as of 2011 we have exhausted all available IPv4 addresses.

Moore's Law dictates that the cost of computing is divided in half every 18 months(Gordon Moore, 1965)^iv; This also applies to storage in addition to computing, in that the cost of storing data is halved every 18 months as well. In fact most physical storage devices have beaten Moore's Law with respect to cost per gigabyte per watt in terms of performance over the last two decades. It has become cheaper to store information gained from use.

Business intelligence is the act of mining transaction data within an organization to derive value and intelligence from the dataset and it's behavior. Recently the advent of Web 2.0 standards means that computers that host information can now exchange semantic data as objects in XML from one another using XMLRPC thus no longer requiring user intervention or the “Duplication” of input. These include standard such as SOAP and any other Web 2.0 standard where you fill out information on one website such as Facebook, Linked In or Twitter and then 3^rd party sites may query those servers using your tracking cookie as an identifier of you as a person; then poll your data and use it to auto fill it's own forms.

This notion of logical “Glue” was heralded as the greatest human achievement of all time by all of the on-line marketing firms, social networking web sites and companies with vested interests in tracking your behavior as an Internet user for profit.

One such abuse of an individual's right to privacy is called the “Ever cookie”, this cookie uses multiple methods and vectors to place it self in commonly used buffers that are not erased by most browsers such as using the Flash object store to create an “LSO” object to be tracked and quired.(Kamkar, 2010)^v

Recently in Canada it was argued that “A hypertext link does not constitute defamation of character”, this has massive ramifications with regards to another case before the courts against the well known site “ISO Hunt”.(Supreme Court, 2011)^vi In that a Linking site which profits from posting links to copyrighted content may not be liable for enabling said copyright infringement.

Other example includes a recent suit filed for class action by a woman in Mississippi accusing face book of violating federal wiretap laws by tracking people's use of the world wide web when they modify a cookie as stored on a web-page that may contain the “Like” button.(Goodin, 2011)^vii

The ethical argument presented by companies such as “Google”, “Facebook” and “Linked In” is as follows:

“People are willing to give up their rights to privacy for communication with other people that would otherwise not be possible”.

The ethical flaws of this argument are that your privacy is a right granted to you if; you live in Europe or North America by either a Charter of Rights and freedoms or a Constitution.

These companies do not sell products; they do not sell ad-space; they sell people! The user base of the web site is the product, your information is theirs and their stock valuation is proportional to the amount of users they have; this perception is reality.

Google, the world largest data store tracks over 2 billion people daily, they have over 1,000,000 servers holding e-mail, web-searches, impressions of text ads, peoples digital pictures, and databases of use; to assume that they do not violate your right to privacy in mining this data for profit is utter and sheer stupidity that should be side by side with notions of the world being flat or the sun rotating around us.

All modern Internet companies have one common product, a group of captive users with data on what they do and how they do it and Web 2.0 simply increased the volume of data available for mining and exploitation or sales. This is accepted as the norm and perceived as perfectly normal so long as they do not attempt to commit fraud or blatantly sell to you via a traditional methods such as cold calls, or telemarketing.

The Association for Computing machinery, the oldest known association of computing professionals and perhaps one of the largest has an entire chapter devoted to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. (ACM, n.d.)^viii The KDD is a group of very talented programmers whom are usually hired by organizations to engage in knowledge management and mining from their internal datasets, however this now includes peoples personal information, a programmer may even be at ethical odds with respect to the KDD as they would have singed the Ethical Code upon their membership.

The trend of profiting from peoples privacy is actually growing as more sites become intertwined with one another the “Sticky” nature of on-line data and exchange has created an ecosystem where advertisers may profile you before you ever see any of their ads. This industry is valued in the billions, and it's being used to drive marketing and product development as I write this; This prime issue is that this trend on the Internet is wholly unethical in nature and clearly violates everyones respective rights; as time continues to pass more court cases will be heard by other violators of privacy; however I fear that due to the sheer value of the market the courts themselves may get bought as well, justice may be blind but she is also expensive.

In the 21^st century most of humanity has been conned into believing that these companies are providing services and goods to make their lives better when really they are just more venues for advertising; we the early adopters and Internet users have been conned into disclosing too much information without demanding compensation that is equivalent to it's value. Every new generation from now on will simply accept this fact of life, and continue to blindly use each of these services as if they were entitled to them.

in.a. (Living Internet, January 7^th 2000) Vinton Cerf TCP/IP Co-desiner [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_cerf.htm (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

iiTim Berns-Lee (W3C, 20011/09/01) Tim Bearns-Lee Biography [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ (Acdessed on October 19^th 2011)

iiiCai, Xue; Fan, Xun; Dougherty, Maureen; Govindian, Ramesh; Hiderman, John; Hu, Zi; Papadopulus, Christos; Pradkin, Yuri; Quan, Lin (CAIDA, 2007) The Lander Project Summary [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/ (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

ivMoore, Gordon E (Electronics, April 19^th 1965) Cramming More components onto integrated circuits [Online] PDF Document, Available from: ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

vKamkar, Samy (Samy.pl, 09/20/2010) The evercookie [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ (Acceseed on October 19^th 2011)

vin.a. (Superme Court of Canada, 2011) Crookes v. Newton, 2011 SCC 47 [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://scc.lexum.org/en/2011/2011scc47/2011scc47.html (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

viiGoodin, Dan (The Register, 14^th October 2011) Facebook Accused of Violating U.S. Wiretap Laws [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/14/facebook_tracking_lawsuit/( Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

viiin.a. (ACM, 2011) SIG KDD Information portal [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.sigkdd.org/ (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)