I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Ronald Leenes from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology & Society: Google/Doubleclick vs The People. While the support for data mining and behavioural targeting is ostensibly to analyze a pool of anonymous data to create better content for the user, the reality isn’t so simple. It is true that the data collected is not immediately related to one’s civic identity (e.g. clickstream data, IP address, browser/OS etc.), but having all that data aggregated at the very least, narrows down your total anonymity into smaller anonymity subsets and in some cases, could “out” you.

But that was not Leenes’ main concern. He was suggesting that the focus on whether data collected is sensitive or not obscures the larger issue of how the industry is managing and analyzing data, and for what purposes (something they are very opaque about). Are these technologies facilitating user discrimination more than improving content? However, as this lecture leaned more on the technical side, these implications were never really explored.

What I find strange is the fact that while the internet might not know about you, it really knows your behaviour well. In fact, it probably knows how you act, your online stream of unconscious, far better than you know your self.