Privacy Scmivacy, let's move on...

So I was delaying this blog post for quite some time, just did not want to jump on the privacy advocate bandwagon so instead I’ll get out my soapbox… In some ways, I applaud Zuckerberg for coming out and essentially saying Privacy is dead - get over it, however I am, like many, are not in favor of how they are treating the interests of their community.  I agree that if you want true privacy, well then lets face it you just need to get off the grid.  If you join an online community, read the user agreement its pretty telling associated with what they have access to once you join.  Essentially Facebook is saying: we have heard you and want to ensure you feel comfortable with your level of privacy, you can dial it up or down based on jumping through a dozen or so flaming hurdles.  Lets face it, they make is super easy from a user perspective to join and enlist your friends, somewhat more easy now that is to deactivate your account (although not sure of the longevity of your data and use after termination) but to remain an active user and fine tune your privacy settings is difficult.  But Facebook can afford to disenfranchise some of its constituents.  A network with 400M community members with 50% accessing the service daily can do that while a growing network with several thousand cannot.   In the end, people will continue to use the service because it provides value for them.  Facebook will continue to use data to monetize content in what might seem like eerie ways now but might be wholly commonplace in the future in order to continue to develop and grow, keep the servers running, pay employees, etc.

In my class, we discussed the transition away from privacy concerns to proper safeguarding and handling of public data.  After all lets face it, there are many other institutions out there keeping much more potentially dangerous data (if released and traced back to a specific user) than social networks.  Think of your friendly neighborhood municipality tax collector, wireless telecom network, health plans etc..  These folks collect vast amounts of data on users, the only difference is that users pay the fully loaded and in some case subsidized price for their service so they don’t need to monetize your content.  If you look at the cable TV industry, if you had to pay the fully loaded price for the creation and delivery of content well lets say quite a few folks would be moving to broadband TV so they subsidize via advertising.  This data is kept secure and de-identified so that no one can track information to specific users but if someone hacks into their network or a disgruntled employee walks out with a hardrive, malicious folks can now get the keys to accounts and you have a huge issue on your hands.  Of course this get leaked to the press and everyone focuses again on security of private data.

Now most networks are free and accessible to the public but need to create revenue and advertising needs to be highly targeted and actionable to be profitable.  But the value is in the content itself and being able to segment that into market segments that among other mechanisms can become a source of market research (see my earlier blog post on expert communities).  There have been cases of folks spoofing user passwords and being able to recreate profiles even so far as to create identities for malicious reasons.   But ultimately it comes down to value and stickiness.  I am not too concerned about privacy.  Well let me preface that I don’t care if people see my online activity, know my activities and what I’m purchasing, tell my friends and than offer me discounts on similar products and services.  I look at that as the cost of being on the community, but if someone was to piece together my identity based on online data well that would make me quite enraged.  I know other are more concerned about privacy and have deactivated their account but that’s there choice.  Everyone needs to weigh in whether they can deal with the privacy issues and the ability to recreate their community and value somewhere else.

In the end, these communities need to but in place proper safeguards and security measures around the data they collect, develop easy measures to dial up or down privacy settings, become highly transparent in term of how they will monetize the data you contribute, and render anonymous all data they aggregate for market research purposes (nothing should be able to be traced back to specific individuals).  Chime in, let me know if you agree, disagree or could really care less..….