Opting Out: Ignorance, Not Consent
Almost everyone I know has, at some point, googled themselves. Whether by the newsworthiness or by the uniqueness of our names (in my case, the latter), we’ve all bragged to each other about how high up we appear in the search pages for our names — or, in some cases, rebuked the accusations that we were an active poster on “My Little Pony” forums. Googling and trawling the internet for personal information has become an art, and I’ve often found myself surprised at the wealth of information about me or my friends that just sits on the first page of Google Search results. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise, but more recently I’ve been shocked at how much information is actually available online. I grew up alongside “Web 2.0,” and while it was initially exciting to be able to share aspects of my life with the world, the increasing ubiquity of services that share information without explicit consent has made it difficult to have control over what aspects of my life, or what subsets of my personal information, make it onto the internet.
I, along with most Internet users, am losing the ability to decide which parts of my personal information appear online. Because vendors are slowly eliminating the option to prevent the collection or distribution of personal data, and because some services are so ingrained in cultural and administrative expectations, “opting out” has
become practically impossible. Either through Facebook or Gmail or through the slew of web tools I’ve had to
sign up for as part of school or to apply for college, huge amounts of information about me have been collected online over the past few years, and I have very little control over what portions of it are shared. For instance, on “Naviance” (a tool my school, along with 8,500+ others, uses to organize the data of over 8,000,000 students) my GPA, test scores, and college acceptance information is stored online.
Naviance can generate charts that convert that information into anonymous data points so that other students can see how they compare to past college applicants. Naviance even uses the data it collects to allow colleges to target specific students based on “state, ethnicity, year in high school, and GPA.”
to decide whether or not it is shared with the world.
Other vendors aren’t so generous as to anonymize the data: when you take the PSAT or the SAT and opt-in (at least they give you that option) College Board sends your information to colleges that have paid $0.38 per name to receive them, and those schools send you information brochures based on what they receive. After taking the PSAT, the contents of my room was about 50% my stuff, and 50% college mail. With what seemed like more than 100 different institutions sending mail to me, my data alone might have enriched College Board by more than $38. College Board and other information-sharers promise to only share my information in specific cases. But once the information has been released to third parties, those promises don’t carry over. Those recipient parties have a large amount of personal statistics and identifying information, and I no longer have control over where that info goes.
Maybe it’s naïve to think that I should decide what information about me is shared with the world. I grew up thinking that I could curate my online identity, but as social media and information sharing has become more and
more popular, not-explicitly-consensual sharing has begun to spiral out of control. There’s a dissonance in the way many of these services work: by combining private tools (such as messaging applications, or administrative EdTech applications) with sharing tools (like data-driven social media, or analytic tools) it’s impossible to know when your “private” information is actually kept private, and who it has been shared with. Take Facebook, for
example. Although not all users can see every post or every message, Facebook collects information on your public profile, posts visible only to friends, and private messages in order to compile internal user profiles.
Those profiles allow Facebook to group together information about your personality, preferences, experiences, and even demographic information and for Facebook, they are valuable assets. They help Facebook provide its users with better content, but more importantly, targeted advertisements. It’s also possible that sites like Facebook could be releasing this information to other organizations, like government agencies or researchers.
I’d rather ditch the major costs along with the minor benefits than allow my personal information to be collected.
This doesn’t have to be bad. There’s a lot of potential for the use of data and preferential statistics. It would be great if high-schoolers could learn, in detailed and anonymous statistical glory, the preferences of different college admissions committees. It would be great if people only got advertisements for the products they were interested in. But the fact is that right now, it doesn’t seem like any of the current applications are advanced or ambitious enough to provide what they should. Most data-driven educational metrics are poorly conceived and fail to consider a vast number of education variables, even though they have the potential to be powerful tools. Furthermore they do not sufficiently protect users private data. I have to blindly trust that sites like Facebook are keeping my data anonymous and protected against hackers. There is an unbalanced trade. Personal information
is valuable (I’m worth anywhere from $7 to $15 to Google and companies like it that capitalize on the data I provide them) but it’s being given away for not enough in return. But at the moment it seems like there just isn’t any benefit. I still get pointless or embarrassing advertisements, what large-scale data analysis I’m a part of is mostly useless, and all the while information is being collected on me. I’d rather ditch the major costs along with the minor benefits than allow my personal information to be collected. More and more, however, I feel like I’m forced to use tools (like Facebook or Naviance) that give unsatisfactory options for those wishing to opt-out of data collection. I’ve turned to third party applications, such as Ghostery or Disconnect, to block advertisers from tracking and using my data on the web. Still, I’m forced to send private messages through websites that openly sell information on their users.
If we continue yielding to the growth of information sharing, we’re letting our own expectations of privacy erode right in front of us. As modern technology begins to make its way into legislative agendas and courtrooms, our resignation cedes our legal safeguard (a “reasonable expectation of privacy”) against invasive data gathering and data sharing. I feel very strongly that not only must legislators pass bills that bind information sharing to certain rules, but also consumers should work with policymakers to create formal standards and expectations for information collection and sharing. But until we can rate and patronize vendors based on what they do with our information, people should be able to completely opt-out of their information being shared.
Jeremiah Milbauer is a freshman at The University of Chicago. This piece was originally published here.
