The magic of the web and privacy

Just pondering over our ‘seemingly inviting and friendly’ web spaces, where we unknowing store significant data about ourselves. Before we even jump on to this, just think of the mobile phone revolution. The intent of reaching anyone at any point of time has long been achieved through these geared gizmos which offer you other attractive facilities - the likes of music, alarms, calculator, convertor, radio, navigation tools, calendar...even the basic phones have all this nowadays – beyond which you have advanced facilities like email etc.

Onto the web now, phew...don’t know where to start...Facebook, LinkedIn, skype, orkut, blogs, google lats, mails, picasa/flickr and others leave you tracked eternally. I mean there is so much about you ubiquitously. Folks get to know your habits, traits, personality, character and even the way you go about doing your daily chores. So how does it all work and where does it end? It simply works because of the natural human interests - Being Connected, Sharing and curiosity.

Staying Connected - For a decade, the younger generation shied away from using letters (Postal Service) and then this avenue of catching up with known folks was an stupendous recipe to satiate their appetite. Suddenly, school friends, colleagues, family found it alluring to stay away from each other. ‘I know you, Do you remember me?, Oh I remember the way you got drunk and fell of the wall’ – some common starting comments. I had to go back through my memory lanes multiple times to find the connect with some folks when I got some messages – No offense meant, I would have startled many the same way.

Sharing - I wish to share what I have managed/achieved. I wish to display something interesting about me, something eye-catching for others to look in me and create an interaction with strangers with a mysterious rationale (includes bonding, flirting etc). And these tools offered the right outlet to this.

Curiosity - I wish to know what’s new with others. What’s is he/she doing now? And it answers a plethora of questions like 'Is this person single?' 'Good enough to blend with?', 'What’s the background/interests/hobbies/testimonials like?' Aplenty more. (My grey cells throw a lot of these ideas but my fingers are derisory to pen these here.)

Where does it go from here? This colossal chunk of information is giving birth to personalized marketing. I mean the tech giants aren’t dumb to just let go of this data. I am betting a big revenue game that would prop up later. Or if I am wrong it already exists. Whatever it is, it is big. Already folks track your searches and offer customized solutions to what you are after. Alerts are designed to keep you up to speed with what you want. And many more if we put some business sense to it.

But is our privacy at stake? This is pure cloud computing as you feed the data and it all exists in some server (physical location) and you don’t care about it as these sites assure you of security of data…Think about it…It means a lot to me when my records is residing in an anonymous blurry slice of the web.

Guess I have scratched my brain enough for ‘Just pondering’… 