With pressure from the media, government and consumers, companies like Facebook and Google are forced more and more to address privacy concerns (including recent hearings in the Senate with Google). Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that Google is going to simplify it’s privacy controls. They are attempting to make the way in which Android users agree to share their data with Google more transparent. With internet becoming more and more reliant on handsets, and with the Android platform expanding rapidly, this will affect the data shared by millions of current, as well as potential, users. They will revise Google dashboard, a service that allows users to see what data they have shared with Google.
Alarmingly, the article claims that “more data has been collected in the last seven years than all of human history.” With such enormous amounts of data already collected and continuing to be collected at an ever increasing rate, the task of allowing users to manage this data (or for companies to manage the data themselves) seems arduous if not potentially unfeasible. Data collected on a phone may be shared by Google with any number of companies or advertisers, who can then disperse the data even further. There is no system, as of yet, to control this flow of data. There was a time when people were afraid to use their real names on the internet, where they hid behind a wall of anonymity. Today, more information is collected, analysed and used about individual than ever before.
