This month is what I’m calling my “Facebook-Free February”, celebrating 5 years of using social networks and taking a well-deserved breather so I can see what life is like without Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. It’s… well I’ll write it up at the end of the month, but it’s rather similar to life with it, only you get a little more time in the day.

Anyway, I now have the type of bee in my bonnet of which I would usually unburden myself by releasing onto Google Buzz (well, G+ but I liked the pun). It concerns the whole “Do Not Track” movement, and the latest attempted privacy furore to come out of the Wall Street Journal in an article called “How Google Tracked Safari Users”. I am angry that people are angry. Let me explain.

I use a lot of websites, and I only pay money for a couple of them – Netflix and Remember the Milk, which charge me £5.99 per month and $25 per year, respectively. All of the other sites I know and love like Gmail, Google search, Lifehacker, TreeHugger, StackOverflow and many more, don’t charge me a penny. How can they afford to provide such splendid content and/or helpful services for free? Largely through advertising.

Okay, so they sell the space for companies to advertise to me, there’s nothing that sinister about that, I grew up watching lots of TV like everyone else and I’m used to it. But wait, what’s this I’m hearing? The advertisers use cookies to track what other websites I’m going to, they follow my behaviour and use data mining to work things out about me?? That’s like 1984 all over again!

Well, there are three points I would make in response to that hysterical and frequently echoed reaction.

1) I can see that this is not actually a bad thing, nor is it to my personal detriment. We can infer from the ways that these cookies work that these marketing companies can find out (anonymously) about you or me – what we like, what we tend to do, what makes us spend money, whatever. But just gaining that knowledge isn’t implicitly bad – it’s what they do with it, right?

You mean, they’ll use what they know about me to develop products and services that better augment the way I already live? They’ll show me adverts for things I might actually want (I’d love never to see another tampon ad in the rest of my largely male life)? They’ll… what? What are we afraid of?

2) I wasn’t going to use that data anyway, and I’m glad if people can make use of any data about me. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me, but I love big data and the ability to gain insight into populations. We didn’t know smoking caused cancer until we had good enough epidemiological data across a large sample of people and could draw causal links. Imagine how many thousands of years your ancestors were smoking tobacco, and before that, “hemp”, without ever knowing it was foreshortening their lives (or at least if they were lucky enough to live to old age).

Obviously, these companies aren’t doing this for the good of humanity, but if my data is worth something to someone and it isn’t to me, good luck to them and they can have it. Perhaps my wiling away hours in internet backwaters wasn’t completely in vain. And if selling that data lets sites provide me with free stuff that I like in return… so much the better.

3) It’s intuitively “creepy”, but intuitions in humans weren’t built to relate to computers and anonymity. For our whole evolution as a species, we’ve been in small communities where everyone has been aprised of everyone else’s business, but on the other hand we’ve learned not to violate the norms of our society without expecting retribution, so we have learned to conceal our less honorable natures. We instinctively see too much scrutiny as a dangerous thing – it makes sense that we have evolved to keep our privations from others, but computers are so new that we see any logical entity as a threat to our security if it knows too much about us. But this isn’t how computers work. I can tell you that as a computer programmer.

A computer can scan your whole email archive, it can determine things about you like grammar and brand names you mention often, but it will still know nothing about you in a personal way. It won’t know your brothers name, or what you get up to on weekends that you’d rather your colleagues didn’t find out about. It is a machine with a set of rules to follow that spits out some information. But it is no more aware of your dark side than the pigeon roosting opposite your bedroom window. Computers may do superhuman things, finding that one document on the internet you need in under a second, and to take the analogy further, even pigeons are far better at flying than most people I know, but neither are sentient. The only reason to fear computers reading behaviour from you is if you are also afraid of judgmental birds in your vicinity, i.e. you are ignorant of the lack of thought process in them, or you are simply a paranoid lunatic.

I’m not saying companies that use computers can’t invade your privacy, I’m just saying that computers processing large amounts of data about you sounds creepy but really, really isn’t, and that’s an idea that society needs to start warming up to.

I’d like to close with the quote, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Call me an apologist for industry, but where some people would put the emphasis on “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“, I would personally put it on “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Let’s hear it for free stuff and better advertising.