“It’s easy to make big money when you get to keep all the profits,” the Glass Balcony post points out, before complaining about the impact of these low-outlay ways on real people:

“Relying on automated support systems is no longer adequate. As the amount of online fraud grows over the years, automated systems are becoming less efficient. There is no accurate measure for that, however it’s anecdotally known that it’s more common nowadays for Google to shut down perfectly well-standing and long-standing AdSense accounts for invalid activity without providing the actual reasons for shutdown. Ditto for PayPal withholding the funds of customers.”

We all marvel at how quickly these companies grow and at their bounteous financials, but we don’t often enough sit back and consider why it is these companies can perform so well.

A huge part of that is down to enabling technologies, from the web itself to cloud computing and, yes, natural language processing and other technologies that will make automated customer service more useful and reliable. But that’s only part of the picture.

At this stage in the game, these companies are playing by different rules to everyone else. In the context of the post I mentioned above, customers are not customers: instead, they are users. If the exchange of money isn’t central to the relationship, as it is with an e-commerce operation such as Amazon, then customer support becomes an afterthought – after all, most of the users aren’t paying with anything more than their personal data anyway, so what should they expect?

But that’s only one facet. Pull back, and this iconoclasm becomes even more concerning.

Taxing times

I’m not suggesting that Amazon, Google and Facebook are breaking any laws, but they certainly don’t pay much tax either, relative to their revenues. In Europe, this is becoming a big issue, which is unsurprising given our current age of austerity. After all, if small businesses are struggling in this economic and technological environment, is it really fair that the megacorps taking their business away (particularly in retail) are so big and international that they don’t have to play by the same rules?

Bear in mind that Amazon is supposedly operating at a loss. The company’s margins are so low that it can destroy most competition, yet it somehow continues to expand. If the company paid taxes at the rate that small businesses need to, this situation would be entirely unsustainable.

The economic benefits for anyone other than Amazon are sometimes hard to see. Small businesses that would have paid their taxes in full are going under, and those public revenues are not being replaced. Of course these web giants are based somewhere – usually the U.S. – but their money often goes through a dizzying series of countries before it finds some tax haven where it can rest quietly. And from the companies’ perspective, why not? They operate everywhere; they can pick and choose.

That can sometimes lead to a sense that the web giants don’t feel beholden to any particular society. Consider these extraordinary quotes from Larry Page at yesterday’s Google I/O Q&A session:

“The pace of change in the world is increasing… We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. Maybe some of our old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. The laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, that’s before the internet…

“We also haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many exciting things you can do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or against regulation. That makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example, that’s an environment where people can try different things.”

Some have mocked Page for “wanting to start his own country”, but that risks missing Page’s point. He just sees Google as a special case that should enjoy at least limited exemptions from the rules that apply to smaller, pre-internet-style concerns. “If your rules weren’t written for us,” he seemed to say, “they shouldn’t apply to us.”

Competition

I sympathize with this view to a very limited extent: the pace of technological change does mean that regulators and legislators need to speed up their own operations if they want to keep up. Where Page and I part company, though, is that he wants Google to be hassled less and I want to see, for example, new data privacy laws that put meaningful and practical limitations on what companies such as his can do.

The great benefits of the free market system are supposed to be its enabling of genuine, merit-based competition and the resulting benefits to society. What we’re seeing here is a reduction in competition and variety, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few giants, and the rise of players so big as to feel untouchable. The lack of genuine customer service mentioned at the start of this article is both symptomatic of this situation and one of its many drivers.

That sense of invulnerability and entitlement will affect us all, not only in terms of public finances, but in other fields too, such as data protection. These companies are worth more than many countries, and you can tell they know it.

In short, I’m worried about where this industry is going. I’m all for progress – I’d have chosen a strange field of journalism if that wasn’t the case – but perhaps it’s time to aim for a wider evaluation of what’s going on here. It’s not about being positive or negative. It’s about making sure that the massive societal changes this industry is effecting work out for the benefit of society as a whole.

After all, that’s why many of us are in this game to start with.

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It remains to be seen whether Google really manages to pull this off in an uncluttered way, particularly on smartphones, but the changes do look promising. However, Google’s mobile maps do present one problem, particularly for those travelling in foreign climes, and that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon: they only offer limited offline functionality. Maps for specific places can be easily pre-cached for offline use, but you won’t get search or routing functionality without a data connection.

Enter Skobbler with its new Android app, GPS Navigation & Maps. A couple of weeks ago, the Berlin-based startup heavily revamped its iOS ForeverMap app to bring it in line with the more advanced Android version of the same, and now it’s moved the Android app on significantly – so significantly that it’s even renamed it.

All in one

To be precise, Skobbler’s new Android app combines two previous apps, one of which was for maps (ForeverMap 2, whose users will get this upgrade for free) and the other (Skobbler Navigation, shut down a year back) for turn-by-turn navigation. The company claims, rightly I believe, that the result is the only Android app to combine both these functionalities for both online and offline use. What’s more, open-stuff fans can revel in the fact that GPS Navigation & Maps is based on the crowdsourced and highly accurate OpenStreetMap project.

The fact that the app is priced at just $1 shouldn’t hurt either, although buyers should be aware that this comes with only one free downloadable country for offline use. Beyond that, cities will cost $0.99, states $1.11, countries $2.22, continents $4.44 and the whole world $7.77 – not only is this way cheaper than the likes of TomTom Navigation or CoPilot Live, but it also provides the opportunity to download specific areas rather than entire countries or continents: a useful option if you’re concerned about storage.

A separate free version gives you full online maps for the world, along with a 14-day trial of the turn-by-turn, voice-aided navigation functionality.

Skobbler’s iOS maps app allows you to download any country for offline use for free, but turn-by-turn functionality comes in a separate app on that platform. Like that app, though, GPS Navigation & Maps acts as a showcase for Skobbler’s zippy NGx map engine – the company is keen on selling its technology to partners, particularly those in the automotive industry.

Anti-Google opportunity?

Skobbler’s app has clear appeal for those travelling abroad – data roaming charges are still eye-bleedingly high in most cases – but what about customers who are just looking to use it locally?

There, the company may find a willing audience in the shape of the anti-Google resistance. One peculiarity of Android is that, being Linux-based and ubiquitous, it’s the platform of choice for the open-source crowd while also providing a growing privacy threat, of the kind that horrifies the same people.

The mapping updates that Google announced on Wednesday are clearly designed to make Google Maps more of a personalized interface for everyday movements. This should manifest itself in a particularly tightly integrated way on Android, as the lines blur between Maps and Now and everything else Google is baking into the same pie. A lot of people won’t like that.

It’s unlikely that anyone will completely replace Google Maps for Android with a service such as Skobbler’s, as Google’s in-house location infrastructure is probably too baked-in these days to avoid. But, in terms of consciously firing up a mapping app to negotiate the world around them, some people may find value in choosing a non-Google option, so that their often highly personal location searches don’t get fed into the Great Google Data Stew. For those people, GPS Navigation & Maps could provide a tantalizing alternative.

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The short answer is no. The Sunday Times (paywall alert) may have billed its story as being about the potential sale of 27 million people’s details to the cops, but the reality is somewhat less alarming. As Ipsos Mori has been forced to explain in response to the exposé:

“In conducting this research we only receive anonymized data without any personally identifiable information… We do not have access to any names, personal address information, nor postcodes or phone numbers. We can see the volume of people who have visited a website domain, but we cannot see the detail of individual visits, nor what information is entered on that domain. We only ever report on aggregated groups of 50 or more customers. We will never release any data that in any way allows an individual to be identified.”

So what does this data tell us? According to the original article, it provides insights based on “gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made”.

Reverse engineering

Now, as we discussed recently, it is easier than you might think to de-anonymize data due to the uniqueness of our personal movement patterns — as long as you have the will, the datasets and the pieces of identifying information that can be correlated with the anonymized individuals effectively described in those datasets. So those horrified reactions to the weekend’s revelations are not entirely groundless. They are over-the-top, though.

There is a significant difference between a register of communications (who contacted whom and when) and a pool of anonymized data where the most fine-grained nugget of information that might be reverse-engineered would tell you that Person X visited the Gmail domain while within a 100 meter radius of the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. To assume equivalence between the two ideas is to ignore the elements of intent, will, data-crunching capacity and, frankly, competence. In short, there are far easier ways for the police to track individuals through their handsets, such as just going to the carrier and demanding to do so.

(The Sunday Times said sources claimed “officers had been enthusiastic about the potential for tracking users of pay-as-you-go phones,” but – quality of sources notwithstanding — I suspect those officers may have been slightly overestimating their own data-crunching powers. They may have also overlooked the fact that the operators would have no idea of their pay-as-you-go users’ age or gender, making it near-impossible to tease out an individual from the anonymized mass. Either way, they backed off once the story broke.)

Not damning

And then there’s the matter of this data’s innocent utility. Of all the sources of “big data” that is both largely untapped and genuinely useful, mobile operators must be among the most potentially fruitful. In societies where everyone is carrying a phone, there can be no better way to establish the density and fluidity of traffic flows and footfall. This data is gold dust, not just for retailers, but also for town planners and councils. It shows us how our cities and roads really work, and it can help us make them more efficient and pleasant to live in or use.

I feel a bit sorry for EE in this particular case. After all, its rivals Telefonica (trading as O2) and Vodafone are also offering up their customer data for analytics purposes – Telefonica’s “Dynamic Insights” program is being carried out in partnership with market research firm GfK, while Voda launched its mobile analytics play just last Friday.

“Everyone is doing it” would be a lousy apology in itself, but I don’t think any of these carriers or their partners are doing anything wrong, as long as their datasets are suitably anonymized. If people could feasibly be personally identified from this data, the carriers and their market research partners would instantly find themselves on the wrong side of existing data protection legislation — the fines in the UK for this stuff are pretty paltry, but they would also quickly lose the trust of their customers, so there’s little motivation for the telcos and their partners to cross the line.

It’s great that people are concerned and watchful about their privacy, and long may they continue to be. However, this is a case where the potential benefits of the data are both great and realistically attainable, and where the downsides are so unfeasible as to be worth discounting, at least at this stage. It’s now up to the carriers to explain this to their customers in understandable and honest terms.

There will be great battles worth fighting in the war over our personal data and its exploitation. This ain’t one of them.

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In case you missed it, the controversy began on Friday, when the New York Post reported that merchant bank Goldman Sachs was annoyed that Bloomberg reporters were tracking employees’ log-on activities. The matter soon gained steam when BuzzFeed reported that Bloomberg brass had long known about the practice, and with the news that the Fed and Treasury were investigating the situation.

The company stonewalled at first but on Sunday, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, addressed the situation in detail:

“Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable,” wrote Winkler in a blog post. The rest of the post, however, amounted to a pushback; Winkler explained that the practice was nothing new, and that reporters only tracked “mundane” information.

As bad as voicemail hacking?

So what to make of all this? Did Bloomberg engage in sinister “snooping” (one NYU journalism prof has already compared the incident to the infamous phone hacking conducted by News Corp in Britain)? Or is just this a tempest in a teapot egged on by Bloomberg’s competitors in the news media?

The answer is somewhere in between. On one hand, Bloomberg reporters didn’t do anything approaching the UK scandal — monitoring bankers’ log-in activities is nothing like breaking into a dead girl’s voicemail. Moreover, the Bloomberg “tracking” appears to have done little more than confirm if someone still worked at a certain company. As a source told BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria, “LinkedIn Pro is more useful and has better information for finding sources and helping to break news.”

All this suggests that some of the the fuss is not about what Bloomberg reporters actually did, but instead is tied to secretive nature of the company itself. This is reflected in a Quartz report that characterizes Bloomberg as “a black box” and portrays a data-obsessed, almost cult-like corporate culture.

News and power of the platform

On the other hand, the Bloomberg episode does raise ethical concerns over how proprietary platforms — including not just Bloomberg but also LinkedIn or Facebook — should handle customer data for news purposes.

The issue isn’t just academic. More and more, platforms are relying on news (think of “LinkedIn Today”) to keep users on their sites. And, as Bloomberg journalists know, customers’ activities on those platforms can be a source of news — and better yet, a source of exclusive news.

The question is where this all this should stop. Would you like reporters to know when you suspend newspaper to go on vacation? Probably not. Would you like your cell phone carrier to use the location of your calls as a source of news? Definitely not. The Bloomberg episode, therefore, appears to be less of a snooping scandal than it is a cautionary tale about what can happen when the line between a company’s news and data gathering operations get blurred.

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Not content with sticking two fingers up at the authorities with his Mega secure cloud storage service, larger-than-life entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to release further privacy-centric services. And interestingly, in a Q&A session with the New Zealand Herald late last night, Dotcom said he intended the secure email and instant messaging services to be both military-grade and so easy to use that the user wouldn’t have to do anything to benefit from this security.

This is always the issue with security – if it requires much thought on the user’s part, it will generally fail. Dotcom, who also released a white paper on Tuesday to accuse the U.S. government of misleading New Zealand authorities while pursuing the German-born millionaire, said in the session that he wanted to “provide tools that give our users their privacy back”:

“We are working on encrypted email, IM, etc. The key to make encryption a global success is ease of use. So I am spending most of my time figuring out how I can give you encryption without you having to do anything and at the same time give you military grade privacy. You are all naked on the Internet. I like to help you put some pants on :-)”

It remains unclear what Mega is planning, technologically speaking, to achieve this kind of friction-free encryption. There are plenty of tools out there for sending encrypted emails and messages, but they tend to involve browser extensions or web forms, or paid subscriptions.

Mega’s cloud storage service has also come in for criticism by some security experts, who have pointed out that its use of so-called “convergent encryption” (in order to allow de-duplication) theoretically leaves a trace of who uploaded which file.

That extradition thing

Of course, Dotcom’s plans hinge somewhat on the ongoing extradition proceedings that he faces. The U.S. had Dotcom and some of his associates raided and arrested at the start of 2012 over allegations of copyright infringement, to do with their highly popular (and now deceased) Megaupload file-sharing service, and wants them sent over to face charges.

Since then, the case has occasionally veered into farce, with the New Zealand prime minister having to apologize for the country’s security services illegally spying on Dotcom, and a judge having to step down from the proceedings after describing the U.S. as “the enemy”.

All the while, Dotcom has maintained that Hollywood lobbyists were behind the raid and arrests. He reiterated and expanded upon these claims in the white paper released on Tuesday, verbosely entitled “Megaupload, the Copyright Lobby and the Future of Digital Rights: The United States vs You (and Kim Dotcom).”

The document highlights ties between U.S. vice president Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA, Dotcom’s bête noir), describing the whole affair as a “contract prosecution” linked to campaign contributions. It calls on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Office of Professional Responsibility of the U.S. Department of Justice to “conduct an investigation and hearings into the conduct of the Megaupload prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

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The appointment was first reported by CNET, which stated that Wong would be “chief privacy officer;” later reports describe the post as “senior advisor” to United States CTO Todd Park.

and has yet to be confirmed, comes at a time of growing public concern over data collection tools that scour everything from smartphones to shopping records, and make it easy for companies and governments to collect information about individuals.

The Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Wong may therefore represent an attempt by the government to find new ways to balance the power of data with preserving liberty and privacy.

During her time at Google, Wong fought the governments of Turkey and Pakistan over YouTube censorship, and she has also worked with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a respected cyber-advocacy group.

Wong’s appointment also comes at a time when Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been calling attention to the growing threat of governments using Western technology to spy on and oppress their citizens.

Wong, who joined Twitter last November, is the second long-time Google lawyer to be hired by the White House in recent months. The Administration recently hired former Googler Michelle Lee to head the troubled Patent Office.

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Here’s Wired‘s explanation on what happens when you ask Siri to do something for you and the information goes off to an Apple data center:

Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

The report includes a statement from Apple, which confirms the anonymized information may be kept “for up to two years.” But, according to the Apple spokeswoman, “If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”

The two-year mark is six months longer than Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, all of which retain search data for 18 months.

Apple clarified what it does with this information because a lawyer for the ACLU started asking questions. The concern stemmed from Apple’s privacy policy for Siri users, which states in part, “Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Siri and other Apple products and services.”

Machine learning technology and natural language processing, which is what Siri is based on, needs a lot of information to identify patterns in data and therefore be more helpful both in understanding your speech and providing correct answers.

Being connected to an anonymized set of digits may make some users uncomfortable, so the ACLU thinks Apple should make that more clear before they start using the service.

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According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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Disconnect.me is one example. Launched in 2010 by a former Google engineer, the company provides “Facebook Disconnect” and other tools to stop the “Like” button and other widgets from siphoning data about your web browsing habits. On Monday, Disconnect launched a major update that not only provides a better picture of which companies want to track you, but also improves web speed.

Disconnect 2: what it is, how it works

In 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created a popular extension for the Chromse browser that stopped Facebook tracking. Soon after, feeling conflicted about working for a major data collector, he left Google to work on privacy issues full-time. He formed the company Disconnect along with consumer rights’ attorney Casey Oppenheim and another Googler.

The team’s first move was to replicate the features of Facebook Disconnect and use them to shut out other data-collecting platforms like Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Kennish made these companies his target because their widgets appear on many of the most popular websites on the internet: sites that offer information about health or news or weather. These widgets, which invite a reader to “like” or “share,” also act as backdoor portals that disclose what you’re viewing to advertising and analytic companies. For instance, the social media companies help ad firms learn when when you visit sites like “6 Things I wish I knew about Cancer.”

Now, the company has unveiled Disconnect 2, which Kennish describes as the tool he wanted to build all along. In a phone interview, he and Oppenheim explained that the new version is meant to embody three goals: privacy, speed and “don’t break the internet.” The company says this last goal means that Disconnect’s filtering tools won’t interrupt or interfere with a user’s ordinary browsing experience — even as it screens out more than 2,000 of the biggest data-collecting sites.

Disconnect 2, which you can install on your Chrome or Safari browser, also has a new look that provides much more information at a glance than the previous version. The icon sits in the top right of the browser; here’s what you see when you click on it:

The three letters at the top, which represent Facebook, Google and Twitter, are displayed separately because their tracking tools are found on so many websites. The user can also see the number of other tracking sites broken down by category. The drop-down arrows provide specific information about those other tracking sites. Meanwhile, hovering over the bars at the bottom shows how much faster the page loads without all the tracking tools (in this case, 28 percent) as well as how much less data is being consumed:

Finally, users can also pull up an image of just which companies trying to track them on a given webpage. If you click “Visualize page,” this is what you see:

The above image shows that BuzzFeed is one of the dozens of sites, including advertisers, data firms and analytics companies, that request information when I visit the Huffington Post (I don’t mean to single out either BuzzFeed or HuffPo — a similar graphic appears if you visit Reuters, ESPN, Weather.com or nearly any other well-known site — including GigaOM).

What Disconnect 2 means for users, publishers and advertisers

The new version of Disconnect should be a hit with privacy-craving internet users, who will welcome the opportunity to throw up a bigger shield between their social media identities and companies that want their data. The faster, less-cluttered browsing experience is also appealing. Publishers and advertisers, however, will not be giving Kennish and crew a high-five anytime soon.

That’s because, in addition to cutting off tracking sites, Disconnect 2 also strips out many of the ads that appear on a website (I visited Drudge Report, for instance, and the prime top-of-the-page ad had vanished). This is hardly good news for publishers navigating an already challenging ad economy. Advertisers too will be unimpressed since the data Disconnect is unplugging is the lifeblood of popular “retargeting” campaigns.

On the other hand, publishers and advertisers can take comfort in the fact that only a relative handful of users are sophisticated enough to understand the tracking issue in the first place — let alone download a special browser extension to stop it. According to the company, there are one million active users a week for the original Disconnect. While advertisers may fear a future surge in the tool’s popularity, that number alone will not have them quaking in their boots.

Disconnect 2: no match for the movement to mobile

While Disconnect 2 has the potential to throw a wrench into the advertising operations of Facebook and Google, it’s also unlikely to check the larger erosion of privacy taking place all around us. The reason for this is not because Disconnect 2 is an esoteric product. The problem is instead that its arrival coincides with a major shift in how we explore the internet.

Today, the most serious threat to our privacy is not the screen on our desk but the one in our pocket. Our smartphones are not just little computers — they are also GPS tracking devices that record our every movement and many our thoughts. Consumers happily enable this process with toys that blare their location like Foursquare and Facebook. And the trend is only accelerating (see Om’s trenchant thoughts in ”Why Facebook Home bothers me“).

In the face of this voluntary surrender of our location and habits, does Disconnect’s attempt to staunch the tide of desktop data even matter? It can certainly help, of course. At a time when Facebook is collecting not just our online habits but our offline ones too (the company is now partnering with retailers like drug stores), any tool that will deprive them of data will be a comfort to privacy advocates. Overall, though, Disconnect is unlikely to be a game changer.

Kennish appears to recognize this. In our phone interview, he said the company is at work on tools to limit the spread of data from mobile devices. He also stresses that one of Disconnect’s primary goals is education and awareness. By distributing a tool that helps average people understand how their data is collected, the company can help build a critical mass aware of what is happening and what is at stake.

Finally, here’s a video in which the company explains Disconnect 2 in its own words:

Correction: This story was amended at 3pm on Monday to state that the original version of Disconnect has 1 million active users, not 1 million downloads.

(Image by  Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock)

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One is a personal data locker where users would be able to store their own information and grant companies limited access, rather than abide by companies’ privacy policies. Some people have even talked about compelling companies to disclose the data they keep on consumers, even though it might be hard to understand and use.

But others are simply opting out of the data revolution.

Stopping tracking in its tracks

One CEO has in mind an approach that comes from the opposite direction. Rather than ask companies to disclose more, Bill Kerrigan, the chief executive of Abine, believes internet surfers should avoid letting companies detect their activity in the first place; or at least try to limit the amount of new data companies can gather to tie with existing information about end users.

Abine introduced its browser extension for blocking online tracking in February 2012. The DoNotTrackMe extension is free, although the company charges for another service: the (temporary) removal of information from popular online data collectors such as Spokeo and ZabaSearch. And later this year, Kerrigan said, Abine will release a service for consumers to get proxy email addresses and phone numbers for plugging into websites that demand that information.

Besides Abine’s DoNotTrackMe feature, there are other options for preventing tracking. Free privacy and security software from AVG includes the option, for example. There’s also PrivacyChoice’s free Privacyfix web application, which displays the sites that have installed cookies on a computer for tracking activity and the data being shared through Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. Internet Explorer 10 was released last year with the do-not-track option in place by default, putting Microsoft on the side of privacy advocates, not advertisers.

The trouble is, if companies can’t see consumer demographics or preferences, websites might not be able to delight customers with responsive features. For example, without location information, Google Now would be considerably less powerful. At a recent event in San Francisco, Hilary Mason, the chief scientist at bit.ly, raved about Google Now. “For the first time (a product) takes everything (Google) knows about me and actually gives me something I want,” she said.

Similarly, at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York last month, executives at other companies that require location and other personal information from users agreed that users are willing to sacrifice personal information if they like what they can get in return.

Bringing data back

Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com and now a consultant and Stanford University lecturer, is in the habit of asking executives what they could do to impress their customers by using data. He also tends to raise the question of how much data, if any, companies should share with its customers.

For example, should an airline grant access to a recording of his or her most recent phone call to the airline? He raised the question to David Cush, president and CEO of Virgin America, at a 2011 conference on big data. (A video shows what happened; fast forward to 5:40.)

The problem with pushing for data disclosure on a large scale is it will take a lot of pushing from consumer groups, and opt-in from one company at a time could take many years. Legislation might not be ideal, either, as people could just go to different countries if they don’t like the policies governments set in place.

For now, both data ownership and data masking have drawbacks. But give this some time. As more companies dream up more ways to target consumers, and consumers become more weary of being tracked and targeted, better solutions to the privacy problem are likely to pop up in response.

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