Internet giant Google has sparked a fiery privacy debate this week by claiming future teenagers will need to change their names when they reach adulthood to escape embarrassing online pasts.
The Courier Mail
August 20, 2010
By Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson
In a warning experts have labelled hypocritical, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company knew “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, and the implications of sharing that information could be severe.
Internet analysts warn information sharing will skyrocket in the next 10 years and personal information, opinions, photos and videos are likely to haunt more than just teens.
The results could affect employment prospects and personal relationships, and open internet users to property or identity theft.
Deakin University communications lecturer Ross Monaghan said online service providers like Google and Facebook were “not doing enough to protect privacy because it is in their best interests to collect information about us” for marketing purposes.
Mr Monaghan warned while users might be somewhat protected now, new technology would make it harder to hide information shared on the web.
“Face recognition for photos is not widely available on the web, but in 10 years’ time any photos or videos of you online will be available for searching,” he said.
“Facebook is adding face recognition to their photo galleries quite soon, and if it doesn’t handle that well there could be serious implications for people’s privacy.”
The social networking leader, with more than 500 million active users, also launched a location-based service in the United States this week.
Curtin University information technology lecturer Dr Peter Dell said users publicly sharing their location online “does raise the stakes”.
Sharing details of regular stops could give stalkers a reasonable chance of intercepting a target and could also lead to property crime as users announced they were not at home, he said.
Even so, encouraging people to change their names to escape online histories was riddled with legal and social problems, RMIT information technology lecturer John Lenarcic said.
“I think governments would get a bit irritated with that, because if people regularly changed their names there could be security hassles,” he said. “It’s bordering on irresponsibility to say a large group of people should change their identities.”
Mr Lenarcic instead recommended that internet users should exercise care when sharing information, and monitor children’s use of technology.