Privacy vs Convenience: What's The Optimum Balance?

Given my past published strong feelings about diminished privacy in the burgeoning online era, I admittedly surprised myself at how casually I admitted a few months ago that I’m increasingly using Gmail online. And three-plus weeks ago, when the Windows Boot Camp build on my MacBook failed while I was in Taiwan, I was presented with another opportunity to open to revisionist thinking. I couldn’t access Outlook with a toasted NTFS partition, of course, but I didn’t need to involve IT (which actually, for the computer I had with me at the time, is me); I could still monitor, manage and create new emails through Gmail’s web-based interface, via either Firefox or Safari under OS X.

RSS maintenance was similarly seamless. My RSS reader of choice is NewsGator Inbox, which runs as a plug-in under Outlook. Since Outlook was inaccessible, so too was NewsGator Inbox, but I could have continued monitoring feeds through NewsGator Online. I was too busy with other, higher-priority tasks during my travels, so I didn’t have time to tackle this particular chore, but my NewsGator Online account dutifully continued collecting, collating and archive the data coming from the dozens of feeds I subscribe from, even after it disappeared from the feeds themselves.

Many days later, after I returned home, I fired up my old Dell laptop, which also had Outlook and NewsGator Inbox installed on it, but which I hadn’t used in nearly a year. After copying the PST files I’d saved from the Windows boot-refusing MacBook to the Dell, I launched Outlook, which automatically also fired up NewsGator Inbox. It logged onto NewsGator Online, immediately recognized that I’d added several (and deleted even more) subscriptions since I last ran this particular copy of the program, and made appropriate adjustments to the local database. Then it downloaded all of the RSS data that had accumulated since I last accessed NewsGator Online, and I was up and running again without a hitch.

When I first activated my NewsGator Online subscription, I did so with a degree of reluctance. By using NewsGator’s server as an intermediary between my PC and the various servers whose RSS feeds I subscribed to, I was giving NewsGator privileged insight into my interests. But without the NewsGator Online intermediary, I wouldn’t have benefited from its advantages last month. As another example of cloud-based synchronization and replication, Google Browser Sync automatically updated the dozens of Firefox bookmarks on the Dell to match those on the MacBook’s departed Windows-based Firefox build. And, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Apple’s MobileMe expansion on the existing .Mac online service base promises to deliver ‘Exchange for the rest of us’, with multi-platform harmonization of emails, calendar items, contacts, tasks and files.

I increasingly find myself accessing Gmail’s online Trash and Sent Mail folders in order to retrieve emails I’ve already culled from my local Outlook database. Again, without a server-based copy of this information (as was the case with prior POP3 and SMTP servers I’ve used), I wouldn’t be able to recover it after pressing ‘delete’ on my computer. And I harness these enhancements knowing full well that that Google is also able to comb through my cyber-crumbs, looking for interesting tidbits which it can turn into targeted ads (and for who knows what other purposes).

What’s next? Despite Larry Page’s declaration 2.5 years ago at CES that his company wasn’t going after Microsoft, Google has assembled quite a robust online office suite which Google Gears even enables you to use when you’re not network-connected. Adobe AIR promises similar on- and off-line capabilities. And you may have already heard about Google and Microsoft’s personal online medical database aspirations.

All of these types of services, when used skillfully and tactfully, have tangible benefits. When used clumsily and disrespectfully, on the other hand, they harbor potential for tremendous privacy-circumventing harm. In revisiting my prior writeup, I’m reaching a similar conclusion; go ahead and give consumers services that harness the evolving and expanding online ecosystem, but also educate them on exactly what you’re doing with the data they provide you, and allow them to easily opt out of anything they’re uncomfortable with. Tools without training are no different than an uneducated motor vehicle operator or gun user: a recipe for disaster.