How the Internet shattered the field of intimacy

Privacy is one of the great conquests of the bourgeois of the Nineteenth century. It begins with the separation of the living room, public place, and the bedroom, private. Now, everyone has the right to his space to himself, away from the gaze of others, neighbours or the authorities. Moreover, the inviolability of secrecy of letters was consecrated by the French Revolution. The totalitarian regimes did not cease to break this circle of intimacy, employing armies of servants to decipher the correspondence personal. It is this societal movement bicentennial, which shatters with the digital. And it’s not the States that open the letters, as in the Berlin of the 1970s, but the multinational Internet. The complaint in behalf, filed on Thursday 30 November, compared to Google, in the United Kingdom, is a new avatar.

A group of consumers british comes to engage in a group action on behalf of approximately 5.4 million iPhone owners in the country between 2011 and 2012. They accuse the u.s. company to have introduced into the devices in a system to disconnect the protections of the Internet browser of its rival Apple, in order to record the paths of users on the network.

Information duly transmitted to its subsidiary DoubleClick for monetizing in the form of advertising. Of course, the data are assumed to be anonymous and do trivially to provide ads that may be of interest to more users. This is the just financial return of the free tools of Google as its search engine or maps. But this practice, without the knowledge of users, may be contrary to the british law, and therefore compel the company, in case of victory of the plaintiffs, to compensate them individually.

A concept more fragile

This is not the first time Google has been accused of this kind of practices….

Like this post? Please share to your friends:
Leave a Reply