Privacy and sausages

Saturday afternoon I made some sausages with a mate – pork and fennel, chicken with Tuscan seasoning and lamb with rosemary and honey. And as always when we finish making the sausages, we BBQ them up for our families. Delicious. If you make your own sausages, you will never eat supermarket sausages again. And on this particular evening we had a slightly disturbing discussion, not around the sausages, but around privacy and the internet.

The neighbour, who I’ll call Jimmy, has rented a campervan to take his kids to outback South Australia over the holidays. Clearly, his intentions had been picked up by his web browser (Google Chrome) and now when he surfs the web, he is endlessly served up advertising for Maui vans by Google Ads.

Unfortunately, Google can only infer his intentions to rent a campervan. It’s not able to determine that he no longer has the need as he has rented one. This has both irritated him and creeped him out a little.

Secondly, there was a discussion around search results. As we use web browsers more and more to conduct our business, more and more information is collected about us. This combined with search engine innovation means that every search we conduct is now being tailored more and more to us individually.

The end result is that if you and I both search for the term like, say “ceramic tile suppliers” we are starting to get different search results. None of us at the table couldn’t figure out how this wouldn’t kill a large chunk of business for those offering Search Engine Optimisation services, as their task becomes pretty much impossible – if not pointless in the first place.

The third thing that was discussed was that one of us at the dinner table had set up a Facebook account with a false name, using a temporary email address and connected to the other members of her family to see what would happen. She hasn’t apparently responded to any offers or installed any apps. It took a couple of months, but offers for goods and services have started to trickle in to her email account. But chillingly, some of them aren’t just spam, they are optimised to information from her fake profile, including the suburb where she lives.

Now I get the fact that there is no privacy on the internet, but I am starting to wonder where there is all going. Especially when the comment was made, “You know, we are still at day one of the internet”.

At least the sausages were good.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.