Joe Hall here.
Google appears to be trying to better measure household and end-user internet traffic, similar to how Nielsen measures cable and television watching habits (“Google Screenwise: New Program Pays You To Give Up Privacy & Surf The Web With Chrome”). In a new program, called Screenwise, Google will pay individuals a token amount ($5 up front plus $5 every three months) to install a browser extension that monitors what web sites you visit and how you use those sites. For households, Google has a router device that will presumably capture all the household internet activity, and it pays a bit better ($100 up front plus $20 per month).
This leaves me with a ton of questions:
- While the browser extension will measure web traffic (port 80, in geek speak), will the router appliance measure all internet traffic?
- Does the router appliance have a way of “seeing” into encrypted sessions using HTTPS, such as when you visit your bank? (It could do this by asking individuals to install a certificate on their machines that would allow the appliance to pass through encrypted client sessions as if it were the client and then re-encrypt the content when passing back to the user… otherwise known as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack).
- Just what is the router capturing? I doubt it, but is it also sniffing wifi, cellular signals, etc.?
- What are the specific terms of service and privacy policy for screenwise? How long will such information be kept? Is it associated with personally-identifiable information or is demographic information enough?
- Don’t these prices seem exceedingly low for the amount of information the user is giving up? I would most certainly price my detailed web surfing logs an order of magnitude or two ($50-500) higher than this.
- I wonder how they’ll avoid gaming… for example, I only rarely use Chrome as I prefer the control I get from FireFox. If I sign up and only use Chrome once in a while, do I still get the incentive?
- Will this information be combined with other Google information, now that Google can share data about your activities across all of their products?
- Will this also capture data when Chrome is in it’s private browsing mode (incognito)? That seems very unwise.