This is the story of a silent revolution that affects every person on the planet.
It's about how we've become complicit in a deal that's reshaping our world.
20 years after its creation, the World Wide Web offers us
unprecedented free access to information.
The benefit of a freely available source
of all the world's information, that touches every human being who can get near the internet is phenomenal.
The Web is about connecting humanity. The Web is humanity connected.
But the Web's gift comes at a price.
We pay in a commodity perhaps more precious than gold with intimate information about ourselves.
People have to think more carefully
about what information they want to put out and how it should be used.
I think people are only becoming to understand what it might mean
to post things about yourself on the internet.
You should not post a photo, you probably shouldn't even take a photo that you don't want spread.
I'd advise against sex tapes...
I've spent the last ten years writing about the Web's "virtual revolution".
This film is about perhaps the most profound and disturbing
shift in values it's brought about and what that means for all of us.
It's about how the thoughts and desires we express on the Web
are being traced, tracked and traded in pursuit of profit.
The product online is not the content, the product online is you.
There is a risk reward ratio here and for us the reward is so great
that whatever the risk is we try and contain it and understand it.
This is the story of the individual, moral and social cost of free,
and whether that is a price worth paying.
This is West Point.
For over 200 years the academy here has trained
the United State's Army's elite military leaders.
This is where MacArthur, Eisenhower and Schwarzkopf
all learned the art of war.
In the 21st century, cadets are being trained
not just in battlefield tactics and grand strategy,
but in how to deal with a threat much closer to home.
The Web is now part of their curriculum. You've all heard of Trojans.
It basically puts your computer under the control of someone else.
Lt Col Greg Conti wants his cadets to understand how the Web makes both
governments and the people who use it exceptionally vulnerable.
The Web is one of most popular technologies in history of mankind.
Every day a new company comes online offering new products, new services.
And the tools are very compelling and powerful, but what we're doing is really disclosing
an unprecedented amount of information about ourselves to third parties
and that makes me very, very concerned.
Digital information's slippery and once it's out there, it moves
and you can't put the genie back into the bottle once it's out there.
Are we being naive about the amount of information we are putting online?
We all want something for nothing.
So every website we go to, every shiny new tool or service that is out there on the web,
many people flock to it and we need to consider as we are using those tools what are we giving away
in return for this free product or service.
What are the risks involved, both on the what we are giving away
and the fact that the service may disappear tomorrow or bought by another company?
So we might like their mascot now and we trust them, we like the
colours of their logo but they might not be the same company tomorrow.
20 years on from its invention, the web confronts us with
a huge dilemma that is only now becoming fully apparent.
Our everyday use remains overwhelmingly free.
We read news for free, do searches for free, and we connect with friends and family for free.
Or so we think.
Few of us realise just how we are paying.
How much would you charge to let a stranger read your personal diary?
How much would it cost them to find that your religious, political or sexual preferences?
Or, where your children go to school?
More than money can buy?
But we give away exactly this kind of information routinely every day
and we are doing it on an enormous scale.
In a month, users around the world
make about 76 billion searches on Google for free.
In a day, we post up 3 million pictures and videos to show with friends on Flickr for free.
In a month, an estimated 350 million of us browse through
the world's tens of millions of blogs for free.
But now look at it the other way around.
And you'll see that free is an illusion.
Every month, Google gathers billions of search terms that help
them refine their search system and sell highly targeted advertising.
Every day, Flickr receives 3 million pictures or videos next to which they can place advertising.
Every month, some blogs allow advertising companies
to plant a tracking device known euphemistically
as a cookie on our computers that reveal our interests to
commercial networks, so they can send us more relevant web advertising.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are the rubber barons of the 21st century.
Their manner of presenting their ideas and power is much cleverer,
more sophisticated, than the 19th century. But in 200 years,
when we look back at the Googles and YouTubes and Yahoos,
we will see people very similar to the Carnegies
and Rockefellers and Stanfords who drove the Industrial Revolution.
We are being judged as we walk around the internet
by who the cookies say we are
and who we declare we are by our Facebook profile or Twitter stream or
what information we put into what website we might go to.
This is a societal shift, not unlike when we moved
from the farms to the village, from the village to London.
All of a sudden, we had to develop a social system that understood how we lived cheek by jowl in crowded areas.
The reality is online life is a trade.
You pay for a free Web but the currency of information
about who you are as a user and what your clicks across the Web say you're interested in.
Every day in this way, we are handing over the minutiae
of our lives in exchange for a free and convenient online space.
To understand how we've become consumed within the Web,
we need to go back 16 years and look at big businesses early attempts to colonise the online world.
A story that begins bizarrely with a pizza.
In 1994, Pizza Hut pioneered Web commerce by taking orders online.
It was called PizzaNet.
This virtual revolution in fast food happened here in sleepy Santa Cruz, California
which back then had one of the most wired up populations on earth.
Now, ordering pizzas online seems obvious and routine, but at the time this was a huge novelty.
What becomes clear when talking about PizzaNet
is the incredulity with which people treated this new innovation.
It even made the front page of the business section of a national newspaper.
As recently as 16 years ago,
people just didn't know if online commerce would work or not.
The Web had originally been created by scientists who wanted to share information between themselves.
Commercial data traffic was outlawed.
Back then, the Web and money were not seen as things that went together.
The spirit of the Web in the beginning was
of people working under the bedclothes with the light on.
People working after other people had gone home
installing a web server sending e-mails, by the way I...
installed this Web server and put photographs on it, hope you like it.
It seemed like a brave new world, like a new democracy,
like a new way of people coming together.
There was this other dimension to human experience which is
hard to relate to today that had nothing to do with money.
But by 1994, the United States Congress had lifted the injunction on Web commerce.
The Web was suddenly open for business.
People were now coming online in numbers.
They still expected a free space,
but commerce saw a new opportunity to make massive profits.
While the early Web was rooted in academia and
the counter-culture of California, the first great commercial venture
had its roots in New York
with the dream of a whole new interactive relationship with customers.
I think the thing that we got right is a true obsessive focus
on customer experience.
Amazon has become the world's most popular online retailer.
It has a customer base of 124 million people worldwide,
buying products that range from its core business, books, to anything from TVs, to food, to clothes.
In 1994, Jeff Bezos was an analyst for a New York hedge fund.
He was struck by commercial opportunities suddenly being opened up by the Web.
Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year.
I had never seen anything grow that quickly, even though it was clear
the baseline usage of the Web was very small, most people had not heard of the Web in 1994.
It was also clear anything growing that fast, though tiny today, is going to be ubiquitous tomorrow.
He had a very Napoleonic scale
to what he wanted do from the beginning.
Meanwhile, the step on was making the book store
and that in of itself was a very unusual undertaking.
Bezos Realised the fundamental problem with conventional bookstores is their size.
This one can hold about 5,000 titles
so no matter how well run it is, the choice will always be limited.
What you can do online that you could never do in a physical store
is build a bookstore with complete selection,
universal selection, so that became the founding dream of Amazon.
Where Amazon blazed a trail, others would follow.
The commercialisation of the Web was the beginning of a revolution
in shopping, and a fundamental shift in the Web's values.
The rate of growth was astounding. If you needed any other reassurance
that you were to something huge, the company was taking off like nothing else in the history of retail.
The global, instant and free space had become a global instant and free market.
All around the world, entrepreneurs seized upon a way of making a killing.
We were reinventing our entrepreneurialism, our creativity
and there was a sense some of the older industries were changing,
this was a time when youth and vibrancy and dynamism would be celebrated in a US-style way.
This was a very exciting time.
Excitement was justified.
Between 1995 and 2000, over 20 million dot com names were registered.
In a very few short years, we've got the spectacle of billionaire teenagers
with barely descended testicles spraying the Stock Exchange...
Who can say what the e-world will be like in another five years?
This optimism that always attends such a bright new technology and the future it seems to beckon,
didn't last long. It didn't last long with me, not because I'm cynical
but because history has given us enough examples.
BELL RINGS
The brave new Web became synonymous with printing money.
Investor stocks have gone up an estimated one and a quarter trillion dollars.
Sales online have doubled since last year.
The '90s were insane.
You were having buckets of money poured over your head.
In recent weeks, all the stock indexes have rallied to new records
led by the incredible surging internet stocks.
How hot is Nasdaq right now?
Smoking. Red hot.
America Online, the auction site eBay and book dealer Amazon -
all up more than 40% in December alone.
The internet has become the centre of the technology universe.
The internet is being viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the next Industrial Revolution.
So much money sloshing around, people getting crazy valuations for their businesses.
Every experiment got tried. Every experiment got funded, including things that didn't make any sense.
Across the board, people had invested millions in Web companies
with a great name, a great idea, but they hadn't figured out how to make any money yet.
Apparently, that could be fixed later.
It was a recipe for financial carnage.
In early 2000, the Nasdaq lost a quarter of its value.
Half of the dot coms were simply obliterated in the bust that followed.
Some 3.5 billion in paper wealth vanished in a year.
In the froth of speculation, investors have lost sight of
the risks they were taking with no certain prospect of a return.
I think people got over-excited and believed the Web was creating a
completely new way of doing business because it was.
In many ways, it was totally disrupting existing business models.
I think people then thought any old business might work which was the logic that was flawed.
People got confused and thought if you had a lot of Web traffic,
that must be incredible.
No, building a lot of branches is more of a unique asset
that someone else can't duplicate.
Building a website was an overnight thing and so most of those companies
were not adding that much value, they just hoped somebody who knew
what they were doing would buy them or somehow their scale would allow them to luck on to a business model.
And yet, the dot com boom had drawn millions of new users on to the Web and made it mainstream.
And companies had learned the lesson that it simply wasn't enough to create online versions
of traditional shops, they had to rethink what the Web could do that would allow them to make a profit.
Today, there's a company that has worked this out better than anyone else.
Its origins are ture to the ethos of the old free Web and yet
it has become one of the biggest money-making machines in history.
It has changed what it means all of us to be online.
This company learnt to make money from the Web,
but in doing so it turned its consumers into commodities. How?
By transforming our innocuous and apparently free search for information
into an enormous money-spinner.
This company is Google.
It has turned our curiosity into its gold mine.
Today, Google has an extraordinary grip over the Web.
Google today is better than Google yesterday because we launched things to make it better.
It will be better tomorrow because we will launch things tonight.
Google makes sense of the Web.
Every day, over 2 billion searches are made via its search engines in 40 different languages.
Normally, you would ask a smart person for advice on anything but
now, you type it in to Google
and you get tons more information than you ever got before.
But it's not just search.
It's free video-sharing site YouTube is taking on television.
We crossed the 1 billion view mark per-day that we're serving.
We can use Google to fly over the planet or look over our neighbour's fence.
It's even challenging the biggest computer company of all,
Microsoft with a browser and operating system to rival Windows.
And unlike Microsoft, what makes Google so unique and special is they have become one of the richest
and most powerful companies in the world
by giving away almost everything they offer to us consumers for free.
To understand what appears to be a paradox, we need to peer behind
the screens into the world that Google has built.
This is the beating heart of Google.
At data centres like this, Google stores information about the Web and what we search for.
In the last quarter of 2009, Google made over 200 every second
from the transactions that pass through data centres like this.
Its net profits for the year were 6.5 billion.
And that money comes from advertising, tailored around information that we give Google.
Every time we use Google, we help them make money.
I've come to meet the Editor of Wired Magazine - Silicon Valley's bible.
He has charted the rise and rise of Google.
One could definitely argue that Google is an advertising company.
Lots of people do search.
We can argue Google's search is not significantly better or worse than,
than Microsoft's, AOL's or anybody else's.
But its hold over advertising is unmatched.
Why do you think the Google business model has worked?
The Google business model is genius.
All of the things it does - calendar, mail, maps, photo management, all that sort of stuff,
both can be given away for free because the cost of delivering that digital service to you
is so low and increases your attachment to Google.
And it will make money from you some day and whether it makes money when you go to search
and it runs ads there,
whether it makes money because it's putting ads against other third party content that you're using.
If you have a critical mass of people using Google as a search engine
and the largest pool of ads against which to run against these search terms,
you're able to match them better.
And if you can match them better, advertisers are inclined to use you more
and this becomes a sort of self-reinforcing, positive feedback route.
What Google has is not such a monopoly on search.
Its switching costs of search are pretty, you know, one click away.
What it has is the beginnings of a monopoly over internet advertising.
The great irony is today's market dominance is about as far away from
where Google started out as it's possible to imagine.
To understand why Google's become so rich and influential, we need to go
back to a more idealistic period in the company's history.
Like the Web itself, Google began as an academic dream.
Stanford University in California has a reputation for academic excellence,
but its alumni have a track record of converting research into money.
You don't go to Stamford and not know that
there's a very high probability
that when you get to the end of graduate school
you are going to start a company or you might never finish
graduate school because you start a company.
Back in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students
investigating how they could sort the good pages on the Web from the dross.
The Web then consisted of about 10 million pages,
compared to the tens of billions today.
But it was expanding rapidly.
So it was already impossible for humans to visit and rate each Website.
Page and Brin developed a way for computers to automatically do the job.
I went to meet their mentor Professor Terry Winograd to find out more about their breakthrough.
They realised that every time a person puts a link
on their own Webpage to some other page,
they are in a sense voting,
they're in a sense saying,
"That's interesting enough for me to put a link there."
And therefore, if they could add up all of those votes, from everybody who built Webpages
they would get a result which was going to be a very close
approximation to what really is interesting to the general public.
Page and Brin devised an algorithm to calculate links between pages on the Web.
And it gave an independent mathematical value of how interesting a page was,
based on the number links to it and whether
those incoming links were from pages that were themselves interesting.
Page and Brin realised that what had begun as academic project could
actually be used to solve to one of the biggest challenges on the Web,
how to find what you're looking for.
So what is the relationship between interestingness and search?
So having figured out a way to decide which pages were interesting,
to what degree, with PageRank,
then it was possible to give search results that were much more useful.
When you did a search for "computer" it would find all the pages would say the word computer on it.
Then the ones that it gave me at the top, the beginning of
the first page, would be the ones that have the most interestingness.
They're the ones I'd be likely to want to go look at, not the stray junk.
So that improved, to a tremendous degree, the kind of results you could give.
This was perhaps the most effective search engine yet.
Page and Brin called it Google.
And Google benefited from the Web's rapid expansion during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s
because its link counting algorithm actually got better as more pages were added to the Web.
But they also faced a challenge.
Each time someone used Google, they used a little bit of its computer servers.
A single digital transaction, like a search, may have a negligible cost,
but millions of negligible costs add up to a fortune.
The problem for Google was that as the Web expanded, it required more
and more expensive processing power, and more and more expensive storage.
But it didn't have a real way of making sure that money was coming in.
Larry would come back for advice now and then.
He'd come to the office and we'd have a chat about the technology
and what they were building and it was all great.
And then I'd say, "How are you ever going to make money with this?"
And he would give this sort of smile, little look and say, "I don't know, we'll figure that out later."
Most search engines at that time were funded by advertising, but Larry and Sergey didn't like that.
In fact, this is the research paper that they used to present Google to the academic community
and what they said was, "We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that
"it's crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
This is what Google looked like in 1998.
Free of adverts, simple, clean and white,
Google's looks hark bark to the amateurism of the early Web.
Yet whatever the ideals, Google still had to pay its way.
Charging consumers to search was quickly dismissed as an option.
Instead, Google realised that they could use their search engine to revolutionise advertising.
This is what would change our relationship with the Web.
They knew that, by definition, when we search for something,
we're telling Google our precise wants and desires.
And with a system like Google's those could be easily captured and traded.
What if you knew precisely what your customers wanted at any time
and could instantly provide them with it?
Well, that's the holy grail that marketers and advertisers have been searching for for decades
because with that information they could create tailor-made ads that would target directly the customers
who were likely to buy their products without wasting money on the people who wouldn't.
Just two years after voicing doubts about advertising,
Page and Brin went into advertising and changed that industry forever with a system called AdWords.
Type in a specific search term, and specific adverts appear in two sections of the Google page.
Now, if you click on one of those adverts, money flows
straight to Google as the advertiser pays for your traffic to their site.
For the consumer, it's as simple as that.
But what makes this special for advertising companies is that it's so targeted -
a selling process
initiated by a consumer looking for something in particular.
Unlike the failed dotcoms, adverts seemed to be the perfect marriage
between what the Web can do and what consumers want.
The first rule of the internet is that
you can speak to each individual as though they're a different person.
It's not a broadcast mechanism, it's a narrow-casting mechanism.
AdWords is a single ad to a single person every time.
It's catching people in motion, it's catching people who are already
in motion towards something.
Already goal-oriented, already halfway there.
Through targeted advertising to consumers,
Google, and ultimately the Web, had found a way to pay for itself.
But Google's ambition ran even deeper than money.
Page and Brin wanted to transform the Web itself.
They built into their advertising machine the analytical insight of their search engine.
And, crucially, this was what cemented Google's influence on the Web.
Their goal was to filter for consumers relevant ads from the irrelevant ones.
So every time you activate AdWords by searching on Google,
it unleashes a chain of events which can be illustrated like this.
Let's say a car company wants to see their ad appear at
the top of the page when someone searches for the words "new car".
They tell Google the amount they're willing to pay
to make their advert appear.
The process is actually an auction,
so lots of companies might be competing for the top spot.
But Google doesn't necessarily give the top spot to the highest bidder.
It judges ads based by how relevant they are to the search
and a range of indicators of the quality of the advertising company's Website.
In simple terms, P, the price the winner pays,
is related to the value of bid multiplied by quality.
This gets top billing.
In this way, Google doesn't just rake in profits, but positions itself
as a powerful arbiter of quality and relevance online.
Google will make the entire world's information available to you
and occasionally will show you some advertisements.
If you want to click on those ads, there might be something very valuable for you to click on,
but you don't have to. I think that's the trade.
AdWords is what made Google the dominant player on the Web
and very quickly the rest of the Web fell into line behind this model.
Offer your products and your services for free,
while funding it behind the scenes, with highly targeted advertising.
The irony is that this ultra capitalist model
requires that the Web stay true to its non-capitalist roots.
It has to remain an open network,
easy to search, with no pay per view, and no areas Google can't go.
This open vision of the Web also requires us users to play
our part, consuming the eye candy in a virtual sweet shop of free content.
The longer we're online, the more attention we pay,
the more information businesses of all kinds can capture and the more advertising they can sell.
The product online is not the content, the product online is you.
The product online are the eyeballs looking at that content
and as much information about how to influence the hands
connected to those eyeballs as possible.
But if trading information on Web users is the driving principle
behind a "free" Web, then where do you stop?
Where does the boundary lie between our rights and the search for profit?
Today we are experiencing surveillance we could scarcely have imagined 20 years ago.
Here's one example amongst many...
Google's e-mail system.
Every time you send a Gmail, it automatically scans the text inside
to find keywords that might reveal what it's about.
So if you write the word "beach" in your message,
then ads down the side of the page might be about holidays.
Or if you write about your pet, you might get ads for pet accessories,
medicine, dog walkers.
If you're arranging to go out on the town with friends, ads for the local hotspots might show up.
Or recipes for weight loss, then you'll get ads for healthy food or dieting courses.
The e-mail service you are getting is free, but Google's computers are listening in
on the contents of your e-mail and matching them with advertising they think might be relevant to you.
That is the price that you pay.
Google points out that all free Webmail services scan e-mail and that G-mail respects privacy
because content is not revealed to outside parties.
On their Website, they say, "We let you know what information we collect when you use our products
"and services, why we collect it and how we use it to improve your experience".
But this isn't just about Google and e-mail.
Online advertising goes further still.
Advertisers are eager to know about our activity right across the Web.
To better understand what we want, they're tracking our browsing habits.
It's called behavioural targeting.
Think of it like going on a shopping spree and accumulating lots of bags.
When you buy something, you become laden with bags.
The branding on the bags quickly gives a way to onlookers
where you've been and what types of things you've been buying...
..and what you're likely to buy in the future.
All of which is very valuable to advertisers.
This is how the online version of that works.
When we visit a site that contains advertising, the advertising
company's server sends back at us a cookie.
A tiny file that identifies our computer uniquely.
Now as we surf the Web, the cookie in effect tracks where we go,
registering our interests with the advertising company.
They then target adverts more accurately.
Visit a car site, get car ads.
Visit a travel site, get travel ads.
It's that simple.
Yet also for many, deeply worrying.
By monitoring somebody's Web behaviour,
you can build up a picture of who they're talking to,
what they're reading, what they consume and that
can be an incredibly intimate, er, and potentially powerful profile of somebody's life.
Many of these judgements can only be quite poorly made out
because they don't know the context you're in.
So if I'm looking up, somebody's looking up material on, er, cancer,
is that for me? Is that for a friend? Is it for a piece of coursework?
And of course, real decisions can follow from that.
I'm really not so vexed by behavioural advertising and targeting.
I think that as long as it's transparent at some level and
you the consumer or user have the ability to find out what is being
used to your supposed benefit, then I feel quite relaxed about it
and actually think that it can be an exciting leap forward.
So, we've seen that we pay for Web search
through being targeted with advertising.
We pay for some e-mail systems by having our e-mails scanned for advertising opportunity.
And we pay for browsing sites by being tracked through cookies.
Consumers are becoming the consumed.
We are watched and traded.
If this wasn't enough, Web commerce seems to be evolving
one step further and perhaps in a more troubling direction.
It is attempting to bury itself deeper in our minds, to try
to shape what it is that we want even before we want it.
And this is where the old dotcoms come back into our story.
Like Google, today many online retailers have got
clever in collecting and analysing information on their customers.
We study your past purchase history
and then use that in a statistical way to...
make predictions about what other things in this massive catalogue
of products that you might be interested in.
What Jeff Bezos is talking about is a whole new level of interaction with
customers and something that's defining the new commercialised Web - recommendation engines.
As you start looking for cameras,
you start to see people who looked at this also looked at that,
people who bought this, people who clicked at this, bought that.
Um, you know, in this, the course of your clicking,
the service becomes more useful to you.
One way to think about that is we are sort of redecorating the store
for each customer who walks in.
If you think about a physical store that would be impossible.
You can't run around and re-arrange the furniture and put
the products that that particular customer might like most up front.
Very, very difficult. But in an online store of course you can do that.
You can redecorate the store for each customer and help people find
things that they might not have been able to find any other way.
Recommendation engines enable businesses to constantly
personalise their offerings to match our interests and behaviour.
This intimate knowledge of customers gives Web companies a head start
in competition with real-world retailers.
One of the best examples is in how it's helping Netflix, an entirely
Web-based film rental company, to rival the bricks and mortar giant Blockbuster.
We look at movies as a really rich area
to try and understand human behaviour
and how to create a better experience
than any other video system, so that people watch more and more movies.
Fundamental to their business is a computer algorithm called Cinematch that uses customers' preferences
to identify other DVDs that they might like.
Movie taste is very personalised.
But what we realised is if we asked people to tell us what other movies
they've loved, in the past, that our computer systems can
do a really good job of helping them choose movies that they're more likely to enjoy in the future.
Netflix now has over 12 million subscribers and a turnover of 1.5 billion per year.
Millions of people obviously enjoy these recommendation systems
and are happy with what they get in return.
But I worry that in the process perhaps we've lost something.
I wonder if recommendation systems don't defeat the point of the Web.
Isn't the vast possibility that the Web offers for serendipity
to bring us unexpected new ideas from accidental encounters,
being replaced by a process that
apparently broadens our horizons, but actually sells us the same things?
Amazon, because we carry universal selection,
really de-homogenises culture.
It lets people pick the products that they want.
You get to read the books that YOU want, not just the books that were cherry-picked
and hand-selected to fit into a store of a certain size.
But just because the Web now enables us to choose from a vast selection,
that doesn't mean we actually take up the opportunity.
Faced with overwhelming choice, consumers tend to stick to what they know.
In practice what's become apparent is that we still huddle together
in groups that confirm our existing beliefs.
Now for companies who want to sell us things,
manipulating that little aspect of our psychology means massive financial returns.
Some of the chance and some of the spontaneity
has to be ironed out of the system for it to work.
I mean, it's not a randomiser,
I mean, it's doing something very deliberate.
It's doing a kind of collaborative filtering as it was called early on
and it's finding patterns and it's trying to use those patterns to sell you something.
Recommendation engines are very good at figuring out
what people like me would do and telling me what that is,
so I can then find out what people like me do.
I can become much more like a person like me.
We are 100% about trying to improve our consumers' enjoyment of movies.
And we help them get the movies that they're going to laugh at most,
cry the most, love the most, it's all about pleasing the consumer.
And if that narrows, that's fine, if that broadens that's fine.
Recommendation engines, by telling me what people like me do
and encouraging me to be like a person like me,
they help me to become more prototypically
one of my kind of person.
And the more like one of my kind of person I become,
the less me I am, and the more I am a demographic type.
It may be too early to judge the long-term cultural impact of recommendation systems,
but there's a deeper and more pressing concern
about how we pay for a Free Web,
and our massive use of online retail.
We are actively contributing to vast databases
of information about ourselves.
16 years of Web commerce has utterly transformed
what privacy means in the 21st century.
These are real people's intimate thoughts.
Just a tiny fragment of searches made anonymously by people who believed
they were using their computer in private.
In 2006, the American computer giant AOL released a file
containing every search made by 650,000 of their users over the previous three months.
Each user was identified only by a numerical code.
But one journalist at the New York Times was concerned that these outwardly anonymous searches
in fact were so personal, that they would reveal the identity of the searcher.
How long would it take to unmask them?
One kind of popped out at me, erm I think in part because it had a lot of searches,
that were obviously local searches, like, you know, "landscapers in Lilburn, Georgia" was one.
And that's not something you're going to look for if,
if this is some town you know across the country from you,
chances are you're looking for a local, a local business.
The user was known only as Number 4417749,
and this person's searches soon became much more intimate.
There were a lot of searches for medical ailments,
you know, effects of nicotine, there are some things about depression.
Paranoia. Paranoia, a whole bunch about paranoia.
We sort of thought this was maybe an older lonely man, with a lot of health problems.
David was honing in on his prey...
Along with the regular searches of businesses in Lilburn, Georgia,
a lot of searches also revolved around the surname Arnold.
I went on to an online phonebook and looked up people with that name.
There were 11 of them,
one of them lived on Shadow Lake, I went back to the search queries and looked
and it said Shadow Lake subdivision, Gwinnett County, Georgia,
and I said, you know, "That's got to be the person."
After just a few hours' work, and using nothing other than these searches
and the telephone directory, David had identified his target.
She was a 62-year-old woman called Thelma Arnold.
She was pretty shocked.
She said, "You know I had no idea someone was looking over my shoulder,
"you know my whole, this is like my whole life is on here."
Thelma explained that many of the searches for medical information were not for her,
but for her friends who didn't have access to the internet.
People are just typing in questions that they would probably ask another human being
and yet here they are at their computer
and they think that the internet is the source of all knowledge
and they have no idea that anyone is recording this stuff.
Think back to the search terms
you've stuck into the search engines over the past week.
It's likely that you can't remember most of them.
But as the AOL story shows us, it's these incidentals that,
when pieced together,
can give us a surprisingly revealing picture about who we are.
There are so many things that people do on the Web now
which are very, very intimate.
In a way, if you know what somebody's browsing on the Web,
you'll find out whether somebody is gay and wondering about coming out, looking at other people's stories,
somebody belongs to a religion that is very different from the one around them.
There are all kinds of very, very sensitive things that people do.
This massive ability to communicate with other people
all over the world,
this massive ability to access all kinds of information
and services and so on, all of that positivity has a dark side.
And the darker side of the Web to some extent includes the ability of those behind the screen,
those who are providing this space for you to you know to monitor you.
The average person seems very pragmatic about it,
as long as it works and as long as all the laws are followed,
they seem perfectly happy to share personal information to make their experience better.
Eric Schmidt is right.
We consumers of the Web voted with our feet -
we're complicit in the deal for Free.
Our complacency is illustrated by a little-known but quite revealing slice of Web history.
In 2005, a non-profit organisation called the Attention Trust,
tried to re-assert our ownership of data that we put on the Web.
It's sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it?
The kind of thing that would be taken up by millions.
I went to meet one of the founders, Seth Goldstein, to find out what happened.
All this attention data that we are producing
we're spending more our time online, more of our time doing social things,
you know, online, how can we claim ownership of it?
So they created a piece of software that anyone could download and plug in to their Web browser
that would automatically store a record of our activity on the Web.
Crucially, we owned this record...
not the Attention Trust and not Google or anyone else.
And only we could exchange it with others, on our terms. The result?
Well, very few took up the technology.
Attention Trust failed.
Do you think that we're perfectly happy in this trade that we're engaged in?
I don't think people know how they feel about it.
So when you say perfectly happy, it's like they've looked at the alternatives
and like, "No, no, I'm happy."
I think if you said perfectly, um,
dumb about it, dumb and happy, or sort of happy and naive, yeah, that's probably more like it.
It's not that important to them right now.
There's no clear cost.
Are we simply sleepwalking into surveillance, rather
than thinking about the amount of information we give up on the Web
and how that might come back to us later?
There are a lot of sort of social critics who say
this is exactly how you devolve in to a fascist state
or a socialist state or a dictatorship
which is you invite it in and ignore the consequences and, and, and then all of a sudden it's 1984, you know?
Um, and I think there's some merit in that.
An Orwellian future may seem a little far-fetched.
But as masses of data about us is stored up on the Web, the issue isn't so much who owns the data
as who might own it in an unknown future.
Danah Boyd is a sociologist at Harvard University who believes
there are lessons from history in how data collected today
can have unintended consequences tomorrow.
There's been times in history where we've collected data
without thinking of how it would get used.
Often for really good intentions.
A good example of that is in the early 1900's
the Netherlands started collecting all sorts of information about its citizens for the best of intentions.
One of the bits of data they collected
was people's religion in order to give people a proper burial.
They had no idea that in 1939, when the Nazi's invaded the Netherlands
that that data would be used for how it was used.
We have companies collecting massive amounts of data.
People don't have an imagination of what it means to aggregate all of that data.
They have these expectations of what possible terrible things can be done with these huge dossiers.
Most companies aren't quite sure what to do with them yet.
The companies are trying to work it out which is why they're collecting all of this data.
And they're not quite sure where it's going.
But perhaps just as troubling as these huge automated databases,
are the databases we freely add intimate information to ourselves.
The great wave of Web innovation since Google has been in social media.
Networking though video, micro-blogs and sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Young people have pioneered this revolution
and Danah Boyd is studying how they feel about living in an online commercial space.
There's so much data being collected about us online.
Do you think that kids are complicit, do you think that they know what's going on?
Or do you think that they are naive about what's going to happen with their data trail?
The irony is that young people actually understand the corporation-advertising trade off
better than they understand the long term implications of that data, and information.
So one of the things you'll hear is,
"Well if it gives me ads you know, that means it'll be free.
"And you know, I'd rather be free."
Part of it is they've never known a non-commercial world.
Advertising is pervasive in their lives.
A generation growing up with the Web may be embracing commercial reality in return for free convenience.
But aren't they missing out on what the old Web once promised?
What we've done is limited the range
of human expression and activity on the internet
to those things that are market-friendly.
Look at the devolution of people's personal presence online,
from the quirky, individualistic, highly-personalised websites,
the homepages of the HTML mid-90s,
to the now utterly conformist and rigid profiles
on something like MySpace and Facebook.
You can no longer define yourself by anything, you must define yourself
by what books you buy, by what movies you like, by what actresses you aspire to,
by whether you are single, married, or looking, by things that the market understands.
But the problems facing the younger generation run deeper still.
I'm concerned that there is little understanding of one the fundamentals of digital information.
Once it's on the Web, it is almost impossible to erase.
All our interactions on the Web, from our Facebook and Twitter status updates,
to news that we share with family and friends,
to gossip that's spread about us, will be on line for ever.
The Web effectively makes us immortal.
The upside is that we can live on.
There are thousands of dead people who are still receiving updates and even being poked on Facebook.
But the downside is that young people, who are growing up in public
by living so much of their lives on the Web,
will have to face living with all of their youthful indiscretions that can be accessed by anyone.
Future bosses, future partners, future friends, and that's for the rest of their lives.
The fact that you are just a regular person does not entitle you to any guarantee that pictures of you drunk
and passed out are not going to be spread across the internet.
And so in a sense we all have to live like celebrities
because there's that potential that we'll be treated like them.
One of the biggest threats comes from consumers themselves.
Young people in particular
who are having no doubt wonderful fun on social networking sites,
meeting lots of people but forgetting the permanency of that kind of engagement.
If people consider companies holding their DNA fingerprint
they somehow get a lot more emotionally disturbed
by the thought that decisions might be taken about insurance, health care provision, lifestyle,
on the basis of that genetic fingerprint.
The digital fingerprint is every bit as valuable.
Do you really want these intimate details about yourself to be available to so many people
and will you feel the same way about what you did last night
not just in the morning, but 40 years later?
We have seen how we are all trading a little bit of our privacy each time we search and network online.
In return for a Free Web, our privacy has become a commodity.
We are economic units in what has become the new commercial frontier.
We've entered this deal in many cases unwittingly perhaps because a deal
just isn't the experience that we think we're having on the Web.
On a computer at home or communing with our mobile while travelling,
we feel we're in a closed, private bubble.
But the reality of the Web's open networks is that we are in effect always public.
What we do on our computers has the potential to be seen, analysed and used by others all around the world.
The Web disrupts our sense of public and private space.
We're not just transacting with one computer, we're having a conversation
with a multitude of computers across the globe. And we are being watched.
That is what makes this such a revolution, and the dawn of a new era.
Some genies when they're let out of the bottle
can you know can cause problems
and they certainly can't ever go back in the bottle.
When cars first arose people were horrified at the deaths on the road.
Horrified, they couldn't believe it!
I mean there were, there were hundreds of people being squelched every day.
It was grotesque. And if you'd just braked in a car at 30 miles an hour
you'd kill yourself on the steering wheel, you'd break your neck. People were dying all the time.
Did they say...
"That's it then, we can't have cars, sorry"?
In the same way as if someone says, "Actually mobile phones do give out microwaves and will give you cancer,"
are we going to say, "That's the end of that"?
Not on your Nelly! There's a risk-reward ratio here
and for us the reward is so great, that whatever the risk is we try and contain it and understand it.
I don't like this extremist view that the Web is a danger zone
where unpleasant people can more easily find
their vulnerable targets.
That's the extremities as it always has been in every society
and as long as you educate to make people safe,
I think the bulk of what happens on the Web is interesting,
exciting, supportive, fun, entertaining and magic.
Paradoxically, what makes us exposed as never before
is also what makes the Web such a magical opportunity
to share, roam and nose around in the riches of human knowledge.
But as commerce comes to dominate the Web,
I believe we must wake up and understand the true cost of Free.
How it's redefining privacy, personal space
and perhaps, ultimately, who we are.
How do you feel about your privacy online?
Join the debate at -
And follow the links to the Open University
for more from those reshaping the Web and the world.
Next time, the impact of the Web on how we think and how we relate.
How our kids are becoming, for better or for worse, the Facebook generation.
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