wanderingstan

Well, at least it’s supposed to be recorded.

Last month I wrote a post about tapefailure, a new web analytics company that records everything a user does on your site. Down to every movement of the mouse.

They officially launched yesterday and I installed it here on wanderingstan.com. First impressions are that it looks great and very slick, but the fidelity of the recording seems shakey at times. They may still be working out bugs.

To see what a visit recording looks like, click the tape below. (Since they used the tape analogy, this is only fitting!)

It’s the “best” recording I’ve gotten so far, which isn’t saying much. But you can imagine how cool (and interesting and scary) this will be when it’s fully working.

…

How can I be excited about this and be infuriated at (for example) ComCast or Google recording much corser bits of personal data? Damn. There’s a real tension there which I’ll have to work out in another post.

What if a site could record all the behavior of its visitors? I wrote about this a few weeks ago with my about a little hack to record all the text selections that are made here on wanderingstan.com. (It’s still recording, as you can see.)

Well, as is so often the case online, someone has already done it. Yesterday I learned about tapefailure.com.

Tapefailure lets you record your users’ browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous userful statistics about your users.

There are of course privacy concerns, but once again I recall the insight of Greg Yardley from last summer regarding the AOL search scandal.

Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you.

(Previously mentioned here.)

Yardley’s advice may be lost on us old fogies, but I was encouraged yesterday by reading Dana Boyd’s keynote talk at Etech.

The rules of privacy are fundamentally changing. For the first time, an entire generation is forced to deal and, for the most part, they are dealing. It’s not pretty and there are plenty of hiccups, but they’re doing a lot better than us old folk. … Personally, I think that we need to look to them to see what they’re doing and try learning from it.

Imagine a time in the future when keychain USB sticks hold petabytes of data and you can download every movie ever made to your cell phone in a matter of seconds. All it takes is one disgruntled Google employee with the right connections, and the complete record of every Google search ever made is now available. Maybe all emails in Gmail too. It’s AOL all over. In less than day this archive shows up on hacker sites and has been downloaded millions of time. Pundits call it “G-day”. You can’t put this geenie back in the bottle.

Thinking about absolute transparency, lifetime storage, and about probabilities over the distant future…and it occured to me that this scenario is not only possible, but inevitable.

It is almost certain that all of our searches will some day be made public.

To deny this means that one of the following statements is true:

1. It will never be possible to quickly copy/transfer terrabytes of data.
2. At some point in the future, Google (or subsequent acquirers of Google) will decide to thoroughly delete all search records.
3. There will never be a security breach at Google in which search records are copied or transfered out of Google’s control.
4. No one in the future would be interested in obtaining a copy of all Google search records.

Of course, the same goes for every other search engine, ever other aggregator of data. One file with all of Hotmail, one with MySpace, one with every video from YouTube, etc… The ramifications of this forced-radical-transparency are huge. Your grandkids, if they want, will probably be able to see every search you’ve made, every email you’ve written. Will presidential candidates will have to explain their search record.

What do you think? Is it really inevitable, or will it happen too far in the future for it matter, or will our guardians be able to keep that data secure for all time?

Do you really want to share your clickstream and search history with the world? I’m not convinced…yet.

I think it’s like wearing clothes. You don’t reveal all of yourself when you’re out walking around. You control your level of exposure, and you dress yourself up in clothes that express you. Sharing your raw click or search streams is like walking around naked. Some people are into that, but most would rather express themselves through controlled channels like blog posts, social bookmarks, photo uploads and such.

But as Greg pointed out, we are all naked to the servers that we surf.

Fred Wilson has no problem with letting it all hang out. He says “I am not a fan of privacy (clearly). I believe privacy gets in the way of discovery and learning.” He uses RootMarkets’ worm widgets to show his latest page visits and searches in real time. (Shameless self promotion: This is powered by the Attention Recorder Firefox extension, which I authored last fall.)

For myself, I’m going to keep a tighter reign on my revelations. But then, who would have imagined how willing people would be to share so much of themselves on MySpace? Maybe I’m just being old? I’ll have to think harder about this.

Great quote from my insightful former coworker Greg Yardley about the AOL search history scandal.

Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you.

Every page request, every graphic dispalyed, every search query; each is a small exchange in a conversation. And Web 2.0 is all about conversations. But this is a substrata of conversation going on below all those blogs and forums and comments.