The next 5000 days - transparency and privacy

In 2007, Kevin Kelly gave a talk about the development of the WWW and its impact on the world in its short life… a mere 5000 days. He predicts some ways the web will develop over its next 5000 days. The web is now about 7000 days old and will not be 10000 days old until 2021. Kelly’s predictions still have time to come true but how are they faring so far?


I understand Kelly’s fundamental predictions to be that the web will become much more personal for users and that it will become increasingly common to link ideas and data rather than pages or computers.
This is certainly already happening and for the purposes of this post I’d like to address how the web has become more personal.
In his talk, Kelly says:

If you allow Google to, it will tell you your search history. And I found out by looking at it that I search most at 11 o'clock in the morning. So I am open, and being transparent to that. And I think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want to have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent.

My Galaxy S3 came with a service from Google called Google Now. It promises “The right information at just the right time.” When I found Google Now on my phone I checked out the settings and then Google Now told me to just use my phone… live my life… and it would give me info as it learned more about me. And that was the price – as Kelly mentioned in his talk. For Google Now to be of use to me, I had to allow it to access my email and my location and my contacts and my search history – basically, my entire digital life.
Is the price too high? I’m not sure yet.
By using Google services, I’ve already agreed to be transparent about many things that I wouldn’t tell any other strangers. So in that sense, I’ve already decided the privacy cost is worth the benefit of using the services provided. Shortly after I started using Google Now, I received an email from my mother that included her flight itinerary for an upcoming trip to Taiwan in several weeks time. Since it was my mother, I, of course took very clear notes on paper about her flights. However, when I looked at my phone around the time of her departure, I found that Google Now had taken notes of the flight information as well and remembered it for several weeks. I received a small, unobtrusive notification that Flight UA### had departed. It showed an estimated arrival time and by clicking the notification I could track the flight.
For the most part, I welcome our digital overlords but I was somewhat surprised at what Google Now knew and how much time had passed since my mother’s initial email and the time when Google Now reminded me of the flight.
As of today, Google Now knows all my favorite sports teams and what sorts of local places I like to frequent. If I read a news item at Google, it will notify me of updates to the story at a later time. If I search for a topic that Google thinks might be research related then it will give me a notification asking if I would like to continue my research on “Children’s books about bullying”, for example.

What are the implications for libraries and information centers?

As with so many innovations, there is great opportunity and great concern. My personal experience above is not unlike those that libraries and information centers will encounter or have already encountered.
As the web has become more personal, libraries and information centers have greater opportunities to connect with patrons in highly customized ways. These experiences can be pleasing for patrons but they must understand that these personalized services can limit privacy. Libraries are defenders of freedom and privacy and although that seems unlikely to change soon, the environments in which libraries exist can threaten privacy in unforeseen ways.
It seems to me that as long as individuals understand what they are sharing and who has access to that information that all parties involved can be treated fairly and with respect. Anything that gathers information by stealth methods is of concern to me.