Digital Life Matthew Webster

You have no secrets from your computer. It remembers every single thing you do on it long after you have forgotten; but is it telling anyone else what you are up to? Quite possibly. The use of personal data has become the commercial bedrock of the internet; if a web-based service is free, it’s almost always because the product being sold is actually information about you.

It works like this: some websites place tiny bits of software innocently called ‘cookies’ in your computer (you’ve probably seen the warning pop-ups). That innocent little name conceals a lot of power. There are two types of cookie. The first follows you around a website, recording the pages you dwell on, the links you click and so on. It helps the owner to improve the website and provide a better service; it also remembers your name, that sort of thing. The other kind follows you around the internet. It gathers all it can find about you and your habits; then its owner either allows people to use the information to place targeted advertising on its site (Google and Facebook do this) or it sells the data to other people. At its simplest, you will have noticed that if you buy something online, you see adverts for associated products for quite a while.

It’s exciting for marketers because this sort of data has never been available before in any quantity. Pre-internet, there was no central record of the shops you visited, things you bought or articles you read, unless you kept it yourself. Nowadays, it is automatically collected by our computers, at least as far as online life is concerned.

At first sight this might seem intrusive, or even sinister, but in practice very few of us will ever suffer any sort of loss through this collection of information about us, especially if we stay in the mainstream of the internet. However, respectable companies are very aware of the danger of losing your trust over the issue, as they should be: some recent research established that about a quarter of us have stopped an online purchase because we became nervous about what will happen to the data. That’s millions of pounds in lost sales.

The trouble is, we can’t have it both ways. Either we allow this collection of data, and in return use websites for nothing and contribute to making the internet easier to use, or we don’t, and pay for the services instead.

I think the answer is to give us proper access to our data. As we get better at understanding how information about us is used, we will also be better able to judge if we object or not, but this can only happen if we are told what’s going on. I don’t really mind an organisation using what they know about me to make better decisions, but I’d like to be in the same position they are, and use what they know to guide my own choices.

Finally, don’t worry: most of the mountains of data that are collected turns out to be useless. One recent estimate suggested that ninety per cent of it is of no value at all, to anyone.

There is more information on my website about dealing with cookies and adverts.