2011 Trend: Privacy
I’m certainly not the first to write that privacy will be a trend in 2011. In the last months of 2010 it was almost impossible to avoid the huge upswing in conversations about Internet-related privacy as we recovered from the uproar over Facebook’s maddeningly complex privacy policy — which is now some 5,000 words long — and looked on as Julian Assange shook American diplomacy with Wikileaks revelations. Internet privacy has long been a discussion, but as the golden year of social media, 2010 seemed to be the year we consumers really realized all the ways in which we are gathered, tracked and, yes, catered to through our many connections on the Internet.
For some, that was a little freaky — as in, Ack! Does Amazon know that my Kindle went to Starbucks in Highland Village and lingered on page 152 of Pride and Prejudice for three hours … or does it know that I, Susan Pagani, went to Starbucks etc., etc.?
And there’s the rub: Considering how confounding privacy policies can be, how much do we understand about the privacy we have or don’t have? How much privacy do consumers really want?
As a writer at Go East — working on a myriad of consumer products sold on the Internet — a sometimes journalist, and a consumer, I find myself waffling on the latter question.
In a thoughtful blog post on the Stanford Center for Internet and Society website, Ryan Calo, Director of the Consumer Privacy Project, draws a parallel between Wikileaks and consumer privacy. He writes, among other things, that consumer candor — like diplomatic — is based on trust, on the “well-earned comfort with revealing to a business who you are and what you want.”
“Companies do not earn trust by using every interaction with a consumer to profile them, much less by storing that information in a database that can, and often does, leak out.”
Put that way, it does make me anxious. However, it seems to me that lack of understanding feeds lack of trust. So, the 2011 privacy trend will likely have to include the creation of strong, transparent privacy policies that are easier to understand and opt in or out of — policies that will provide greater protection for the consumers who want it and better results for those who choose to opt into profiling.
Yet, on the opt-in side, the communications writer in me finds the potential power of well-aimed online advertising well-nigh irresistible.
I enjoyed a humorous, yet pointed blog post by Robert Wright on the New York Times website, in which he posited that if Google, Bing and other search engines can figure out how to use consumers’ personal information to better target their needs and wants — as he says, targeting the individual, not the audience bucket — they could actually save journalism. If targeted ads actually worked, consumers would click and buy, more companies would advertise, online news would finally have a revenue source, journalists would be paid a livable wage and their research and interviews would be funded — a supportable outcome as each year more folding newspapers continue to go the way of the curlew. Win, win, win!
For that — and the assurance of neither being bombarded with useless ads nor having my identity stolen or misappropriated — I might give up a little privacy. How about you?
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I’ve thought about whether this will be confusing to those on my mailing list, but in reality, aside from my elderly grandpa who doesn’t speak good English anyway, I don’t think I have reason to worry. I think even my 89-year-old great uncle will get a good chuckle.
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