The March 1st issue of Newsweek ran an article from Daniel Lyons about privacy on the web, titled Google’s Orwell Moment. The article starts off with a now-familiar recap of Google’s recent privacy gaffe related to Buzz, and discusses the controversy around Facebook’s recent change in privacy controls. But it is the second half of the article that contains the insightful bits. Lyons writes:
“What’s happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It’s what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.”
He goes on:
“The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they’ve created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them… Their entire business model is based on the notion of ‘monetizing’ our privacy.”
In the general sense, this is capitalism at its best – create a product and price it however you want (in dollars, euro or bits of private data), then let the market decide if they are willing to pay the price. In the cases of Google and Facebook, the market has answered overwhelmingly favorably, with Google running a unique audience last month of 362M [1], and Facebook reporting over 400M active users [2]. But then Lyons gets to the crux of the matter:
“The problem with buying things with your privacy is you really don’t know how much you’re paying. With money, five bucks is five bucks. But what is the value of your list of friends? If it’s not worth much, your membership on Facebook may be the deal of a lifetime. If it’s incredibly valuable, you’re getting massively ripped off. Only the techies know how much your info is worth, and they’re not telling.”
Lyons hits on one problem with the current market for private data – that the consumer is largely in the dark as to what it is disclosed and what it worth, and they have very few avenues to shop it around to get a competitive price. It is kind of a take-it-or-leave-it approach. A consumer could bail out of Google and decide to use Bing instead, but they wouldn’t really have any idea of the price, in this case, what information is each of these behemoths collecting and sharing with their advertisers and other corporate customers?
What if there were a different way?
- What if, instead of big companies covertly collecting massive databases of consumers’ personal data and selling it to the highest bidder, there were a way for individual consumers to each amass a collection of their own personal data and interests in a standard format?
- What if there were open, standards-based ways for consumers to transact that data with companies they trust, when and where they choose, in an open and transparent way?
- What if, because the data was collected and curated by an agent under the control of the user, the data was much richer, deeper and accurate than the data inferred by advertising cookies?
Would companies ‘pay’ more to get this higher-quality volunteered personal data? I think so.
When will this ‘what if’ become reality? I’m not sure, but there are lots of great people working on it in various places. Check out these resources, and if you find one that interests you, and you really want to take back your privacy, join and start contributing!
- The Higgins Project is building an open-source “Personal Data Store” and an active client to interact with it.
- UMA, the User Managed Access working group of the Kantara project is developing specification that let an individual control the authorization of data sharing.
- Project VRM, at Harvard’s Berkman Center, aims to improve markets by defining ways for user-controlled engagement with vendors.
- The Internet Identity Workshop – a meeting place for all of the above, and other groups working on user-controlled personal data sharing.
References:
- Nielsen Internet Ratings
- Facebook self-reported statistics
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