Apparently the Wall Street Journal discovered over the weekend that companies can gather lots of data about you on the Internet.
I suppose this is their play for a Pulitzer Prize -- a groundbreaking story that exposes the evil of Internet data collection. Only one problem: The Internet -- and financial industry -- has been mining your data for over a decade. And unless you hide in a cave with Ted Kaczynski, you're not going to escape it.
In fact, everybody mines your data. Think of the credit-card companies or your bank. Or Google. They know everything. I like to tell my wife that, "Google knows more about me than you do."
My former colleague and good friend Stephen Saunders points out where it will end. He calls it the Outernet: It's a total end of privacy. He's right. It's more Orwellian than Orwell.
I thought the WSJ article was thorough and well researched, but it kind of missed the point. The advertising exchanges, to me, are much more innocuous to me than other things going on -- such as the data collection at Google or Facebook, which can connect to data to all of your personally identifiable information, such as your email, your home address, and all of your friends and relatives.
The Rayno Report has been following data exchanges such as Blue Kai here before. The market is exploding, and I would expect you to see gargantuan amounts of anonymous surfing data to become part-and-parcel of Internet ecommerce in the next few years. But the point is: It's anonymous. And that's different from what Facebook wants to do, which is build a publicly identifiable "social graph" of your life, sometimes with an opt-in, sometimes without.
What to do about it? As former Sun Micrososystems CEO Scott McNealy famously said, you lost your privacy on the Internet a long time ago. Why are we worried about Blue Kai, when clearly, Google and Facebook have much more powerful databases that track literally everything you do every minute of your life?
Basically, if you don't like the Outernet, you need to drop out of modern society. Or stop using Facebook. Or stop complaining.
