Some 83 million people have signed up to get daily deals from website Groupon, but this weekend, they got something else: A notification that the site was relaxing its privacy policy, a move experts say is becoming all too common — and increasingly troubling.
Across the web, privacy protections seem to be falling away. Groupon is only the latest major site to expand its rules about what the site may do with users’ “personal information” — a catch-all phrase that typically includes a user’s birth date, shopping history, location, and whatever else it can grab. Facebook has also gradually relaxed its privacy restrictions; last month, the site added technology that will automatically identify its users in photographs. Also in June, professional networking site LinkedIn (lnkd) gave itself the authority to use members’ recommendations for commercial purposes.
The trend seems to be going one way — and one way only. Among the newest tech entrants, mobile phone apps, 25% of the 340 most popular don’t have a privacy policy at all, according to Truste, a San Francisco-based internet consulting group. That means there are no limits on what those apps can do with users’ data. “We can only expect to see this practice increase,” says Amber Yoo, director of communications for San Diego, CA.-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group.
For companies that collect it, this data is potentially very lucrative. Firms use it to learn how best to target their marketing emails and advertisements, or which ads are working, and why. The main goal is “to sell you things,” says Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington, D.C.,-based think-tank. It’s a tacit agreement users make in exchange for free content, or daily deals, or unlimited access to friends’ status updates. “Online ad tracking is what pays for your free content,” he says.
But this silent trade-off between consumers and businesses raises other concerns for consumer advocates. Insurance companies are increasingly interested in information about policy-holders’ buying habits — whether you smoke or engage in extreme sports, for example — says Yoo: “If you buy fast-food coupons, you could get higher premiums on your health insurance.” In one case due to be heard next year, an insurance company in Canada stopped a woman’s disability payments after Facebook photos surfaced of her allegedly posing on a beach.
For their part, Groupon, Facebook and LinkedIn say they never sell information about their users, they just share it with their businesses partners. It has become common practice, says Groupon spokeswoman Julie Mossler: “This isn’t different than what’s possible for any other site.” A Facebook spokeswoman notes that people who don’t want to be tagged in photos can adjust their privacy settings to block that technology, and LinkedIn spokeswoman Erin O’Harra says the site doesn’t share personal information without permission, but “many LinkedIn members have published personally identifiable information on the site that is available for public view.”
To avoid sharing confidential information, experts recommend signing up for deal sites with an email account you could easily ditch — say, a Hotmail account that you use exclusively for buying things or receiving newsletters. That’s far better than signing up using an existing social networking account, which a growing number of sites will let you do. Consumers can also check who’s tracking them, Polonetsky says, via websites like AboutAds.info that can reveal what companies are currently tracking your online activity and can block them from spying on your computer with just a few clicks. But the best way to keep your personal information, well, personal, is to be careful what you put online, says Perry Aftab, an internet privacy lawyer. “Don’t share personal information just because you want a deal on Chinese food down the block,” she says.
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