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Home - posts tagged as Privacy
The coming privacy boom posted on August 17, 2010
 Privacy
A piece I posted on SmartDataCollective last week:
A year ago, at a cover meeting at BusinessWeek, I
proposed a big story: The Privacy Pay-off. The idea was that tracking
and other data surveillance would spark a reaction: People would fear
for their privacy. And this would create all sorts of business
opportunities, the privacy pay-off.
It sounded like a plausible
idea to the editors. So I went off hunting for companies cashing in on
this expanding new market. I figured that certain advertisers would seek
competitive advantage by offering privacy guarantees. I hoped that at
least a couple would transform their privacy statements, changing them
from unreadable legalese into a clear and compelling promise. Someone,
somewhere had to be turning privacy statements into marketing tools.
I
also talked to the research divisions of major tech companies. They had
to be developing technology to help individuals manage and defend their
privacy in a data-driven world.
Long story short: I did lots of
research, and I never found the cover story. Sure, I picked up threads
of it. EMC's Mozy service, for example,
offers cloud-based data storage with military-grade encryption. It costs
more than, say, Google Docs. That's the privacy premium. Researchers at
Microsoft, HP and IBM were coming up with new filters and tools. I
learned about data records that "aged," vanishing after six months or a
year. That Viagra receipt you might not want marketers to see would go
poof. A hint of privacy pay-off? Perhaps.
This new market
requires awareness, and feeds on fear. Last week's Wall Street Journal series on
privacy, which carried some provocative headlines, provides a dose of
that. And now I see that others are pointing to the market potential for
privacy. Jeff Jarvis agrees with
me. Fred Wilson does too. Wilson, a
VC, holds investments in Twitter, Foursquare, and other start-ups built
on publicness (Jarvis' word). And yet Wilson says:
"There
are business opportunities in privacy-related services...The challenge
is to get someone [whether business or consumer] to pay $2-$10 dollars
per month to ensure that sort of premium privacy."
As I
researched my doomed story, I saw two mass-market data economies taking
shape. One, the free economy (embodied by Google), provides users with
near limitless services free of charge, and in return asks only for
their data. It gains intelligence from that data, which supports its
advertising business. The privacy policy in this free economy is simple:
Trust us.
The second (and far smaller) data economy is built upon
distrust. If you place your private data--your clickstream, your
finances, health records, kids pictures, your location, social
network--onto the networks, people will take advantage of you, harm you,
spill your secrets, steal from you. So pay a privacy premium and stay
safe. This is the policy companies have been following for decades, and
now outfits like Mozy are offering these services to individuals.
I'm
still grappling with the question of why the privacy payoff is taking
so long to materialize. I think it has a lot to do with two basic
factors. First, people tell pollsters they care about privacy. But they
also like free stuff and hate to pay premiums, especially in a down
economy. Second, despite all the fears about privacy, people have reason
to share lots of their data. Far beyond gossip, there's a value to it.
It connects people to friends, answers, insights, business
opportunities. For proof, look no further than the half billion folks on
Facebook, or at Fred Wilson's thriving portfolio. Even cookies serve a
useful function. (Erase them and you'll go crazy typing passwords to
visit Web sites.)
Yes, I still believe the privacy pay-off will
come. Turning privacy policies into marketing opportunities seems like a
no-brainer. Smart filters will sell. But given the power of the free
and public data economy, I suspect the privacy-wing will remain a niche
market. In BusinessWeek lingo, a six-column story, not a cover.
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When it comes to tracking customers, few match the Wall Street Journal posted on August 4, 2010
Privacy
Advertisers who track user behavior online always put in this qualifier: It's anonymous. In other words, they track a Web surfer who seems interested in new cars or romantic movies, but not the specific person. In its latest in a series on data tracking, the Wall Street Journal today reports that this anonymity is "in name only." New technologies can come close to zeroing in on the person with just a smattering of data. Peter Eckersley, staff scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, says, 33 bits on a person is enough.
Yet the Wall Street Journal, a vigorous customer tracker itself, doesn't have to go to all that trouble. A reader, Mark Naples, pointed out in an email that the Journal, one of few media outlets with a pay-wall, collects personally identifiable info online and has the ability to marry it with the behavior data scooped up with cookies.
Another commenter on this site, Michael Sandora, details the same points on his blog, Indigestion. The difference between most data trackers and the Wall Street Journal, he writes, is this:
To a data tracker, I am a cookie number interested in bluegrass
music, jam-bands, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and reading about digital
media.
To the Wall Street Journal’s subscription service, I am Michael
Sandora, email address: msandora@thisnotmyemail.com, credit card number
####-####-####-####, bluegrass listener, Star Wars fan, and digital
media follower.
What's more, the Journal's privacy policy, dating from 2008, reserves the right to share this valuable trove with "other select companies to send you promotional materials about
their products and services (that is, unless you've told us not to do so...)
I subscribe to the Journal, use their site, and really don't have problems with their blending my behavioral data with the personally identifiable stuff. I don't mind targeted advertising. And as someone who has lived off of advertising in media my entire career, I want journalism to find a funcional business model for the Internet age. But if the Journal is going to write a series on data privacy, they should pay more than passing attention to the practices of their own company.
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Privacy loses every time posted on August 2, 2010
Privacy
Monday morning, and before I'm finished my first cup of coffee, I see two stories about the fall of privacy. First, the United Arab Emirates is shutting down
Blackberry data services in their corner of the Arabian Peninsula
because they can't evesdrop on the heavily encrypted messages. Next, I
see in the Wall Street Journal
(behind firewall) that the advertising side of Microsoft, in 2008,
fought back a plan that would have thwarted cookies
(as a default setting) in the the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser. How could
Microsoft sell ads, they argued, with a browser that keeps advertisers from learning
about the Web-surfing patterns of their potential customers?
Both the UAE and Microsoft have reasons to do what they're doing.
The UAE is an oasis of relative freedom in a region that's short of it.
People of all nationalities work in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. I was there
last March. You meet Filipinos, Indians, Kenyons, Europeans, Moroccans. It's a
regular UN. No place would be easier for Al Qaeda to do banking,
organizing, bombing. You can even drive to the UAE from Yemen (though Google
maps,for one reason or another, isn't able to give me the directions).
I'm sure this move by the government angers many in the country (not
least the Blackberry subscribers), but there's a defensable national
security argument for it. It's at least as solid as the reasoning
behind the 2001 Patriot Act in the U.S.
Microsoft
also had its reasons not to interfere with cookies. It had to do with
the profits in its online business, which struggles mightily against
Google, among others. Given the choice between contracts from paying
advertisers and appreciation of privacy-loving and non-paying Web
surfers, they went with the bucks.
And that's my point. Privacy
almost always loses. People say they care about it, but most of us are really
like the UAE and Microsoft. Given a choice between the promise of
security and privacy, we usually opt for security. (We march like sheep
through the scanners at the airport, letting them oggle and grope us,
and we even tolerate it when they snap, NO JOKES!)
At the same
time, most of us drop our privacy concerns in a snap to
save $5 at the supermarket, with a customer loyalty card, or five minutes at a toll booth. What's more, if we
really cared deeply about privacy on the Internet, more of us would ditch Web mail, enable privacy browsing on our computers (and go to the trouble of typing a lot more passwords). And we'd heave the
biggest surveillance machines, our cell phones, into the nearest
gutter. I, for one, choose not to.
What's this all mean? We have hand-me-down notions of privacy that don't really fit our modern machines, networks and lives. In coming years, we'll see that some invasions of privacy (like cookies, in my opinion) are largely abstract. But we'll find others that are all too real. (I fear them in areas of police and medical surveillance.) For now, though, privacy loses, just about every time, to economics and promises of safety.
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Smart systems, dumb ones, and privacy posted on July 11, 2010
Privacy
Everywhere I talk about the Numerati, I find people worrying
about the erosion of personal privacy. This post is about the flip side
of that fear, about living in a world run by systems that don't know
us, that are dumb and fixed in their ways. In short, this is about the
world we've been living in for the last century or so.
A couple days ago, we received a copy of our credit report. The amount
of wrong information was startling. We lived for years in Paris,
France. The credit report has it as Paris, Texas. And it misunderstood
the address of my office in Mexico City for someplace in Ohio. These
are not the smart systems that cause so much concern. These are the
dumb computers we've been living with for decades. They're clueless,
and their misunderstandings cause all sorts of problems extending far
beyond the world of credit.
These old computer systems do not know us. They treat us like dots and
place us into groups (often based on misreading of our data) and then
they use rules to manage us. Living under these formal systems and
their kissing cousins, bureaucracies, some of us nurse the illusion of
privacy.
The way I see it, we're going to be managed by machines, one way or
another. We cannot build logistics for seven billion people on
face-to-face interactions. So the question is whether we want those
systems running our lives to know us, and to be (relatively) smart. Or
do we stick with the clueless status quo?
I'm for smart systems. I want Amazon to know my book tastes, the bank
to give me loans based on my personal record (and not my general
profile), most junk-mailers to understand that I would never buy what
they're selling, the electricity company to hitch me to a smart grid. I
could go on and on. Privacy? Yes, it can be a problem, and we'll figure
out ways to deal with it. But these dumb formal systems are for the
birds.
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The payback of "publicness." posted on May 25, 2010
Privacy
I see that my friend Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine.com and What Would Google Do?, has a contract for a new book, Public Parts, on living a public life. Here's how he describes it:
In Public Parts, I’ll argue, as I have here,
that in our current privacy mania we are not talking enough about the
value of publicness. If we default to private, we risk losing the value
of the connections the internet brings: meeting people, collaborating
with them, gathering the wisdom of our crowd, and holding the powerful
to public account.
I agree that we have to rethink our hand-me-down ideas on
privacy. Every secret that we keep has a value, and an opportunity
cost. By keeping it private, we forego the connections we can make by
sharing it, and the information and contacts people can potentially add
to it. Jeff's prostate cancer, which he has written about a lot,
is a case in point. If he had kept it to himself, his readers wouldn't
have learned some of the details that would embarrass most of us. But
Jeff would not have benefitted from the advice and know-how of hundreds
of his readers and online friends.
If we bring business into the picture, and start to piece together a cost-benefit analysis, Jeff's openness led to a major story
by Steven Johnson in Time Magazine, a radio session with Howard Stern, and lots of other exposure. This couldn't have hurt when Jeff
and his agent were negotiating his advance with HarperCollins for his
next book. So "publicness" can help to build a personal brand. If you
count lost opportunities, keeping certain secrets can cost money. (Conversely, there is information that we routinely used to share, such as commercial preferences, which now can be used to target us with advertising campaigns and phone spam. So we have to rethink our secrets in both directions.)
In any case, here's one point where I think Jeff should tread carefully. In his writings,
he often uses himself as the guinea pig. That's natural. It's what
bloggers do. But Jeff's risk-reward ratios, when it comes to
publicness, are not like most people's. He's an excellent and
well-known writer and a brand. When he blogs about his indignities, it
makes waves--and creates bankable opportunities.
The networked world he is operating in, however, works on the curve of a power law.
He doesn't just get twice or five times as much attention as another person who chooses to go public online. He might
get 100, 1,000 or 10,000 times as much attention. That's how power laws
work.
So while "publicness" pays off for Jeff, the same rewards
are not likely to reach most people who write openly about
traditionally private stuff. There can be payoffs for them as well. They can make friends, gain support and insights. But
their ratios are different.
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The privacy pay-off: What happened? posted on January 26, 2010
Privacy
Last summer I pitched a BusinessWeek story to be called The Privacy Pay-off. The idea was that enlightened companies would figure out how to market data privacy, and they would use it to give themselves a competitive advantage. Instead of cloaking what they did with cookies and personal data behind virtually unreadable (and unread) privacy policies, they would promote these policies with utter clarity.
The idea? These privacy-savvy companies would gain the trust of consumers. And with that trust, they would win access to ever more data, which they could use to provide customized services.
I never wrote the story. I blame this on two things. First, BusinessWeek was on the block, suitors were circling, and I was distracted. Far more important, I never found good examples of companies angling for the privacy pay-off. Do you know any?
In any case, I did lots of reporting. Before it all goes rotten, I'll be blogging bits and pieces of it, and perhaps incorporating strands of it into larger stories. I used some of it for a post I wrote yesterday, What Does Google Know about You?, on the Smart Data Collective. (According to my agreement with the site, I write one exclusive post per month.)
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| I went into New York yesterday for a BusinessWeek reunion near Times Square. It had rained most of the day, and as I walked up from Penn Station I focused on some of the puddles...
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Workplace surveillance: Get used to it posted on December 15, 2009
Privacy
Am I getting jaded? I read this case on GigaOm and Mashable about a case in
which a local government claims the right to monitor messages on a
government-issued pager. My first reaction: If you're sending digital
messages on machinery issued by an employer, assume that they'll be
monitored.
Further, even if the Supreme Court reviews this case and rules for the privacy of the individual, continue to assume that employers will monitor this information. It's simply too valuable to ignore.
Look at it this way. Companies are busy defending themselves and
their networks. They're sifting through emails looking for
spam, leaks of insider information, and signs of sexual harassment.
Google's Postini unit does this type of analysis. What's more, for
compliance with federal laws and security regulations, companies must
archive communications. And they can be sued if signs of malfeasance are coursing through their networks unnoticed.
So they're supposed to carry out all of this analysis and then turn a
blind eye to allegedly sexually explicit messages sent from a
company-issued machine? It's not going to happen. We're under all kinds
of questionable surveillance in the rest of our lives. Companies like
Acxiom and LexisNexis maintain dossiers on us. Government techno-spies
have been analyzing e-mail, Web surfing and phone communications since
9/11.
But surveillance in the work place? In my view, that comes with the job. As I say, maybe I'm jaded.
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danah boyd: Who benefits from Web privacy? posted on December 11, 2009
Privacy
Just watched a very provocative talk by Microsoft's danah boyd at LeWeb. (Here's the text, video below) She shifts the usual perspective on the privacy debate and asks if society should be paying more attention to people who appear to be crying out for help on line.
Back in the '60s and '70s, she says, adults enjoyed a right to privacy, which sometimes included spousal abuse in the privacy of the home. If wives and other victims didn't call for help or circulate showing conspicuous bruises, it might have seemed that domestic abuse wasn't a big problem. Now we know more about it. But does that mean that it's growing, or that people's privacy is being invaded?
Much the same is happening online. Some parents, boyd says, are encountering online bullying and blaming the Internet for it. But this bullying, according to boyd (who doesn't capitalize her name), only makes visible what has long existed in the analog world as spoken taunts and rumors.
So the question is whether society has an obligation to pay attention to the pain expressed publicly on the Internet, the pain, anger, and alienation. If people are crying out on the networks we circulate on and we turn away, are we like the New Yorkers who allegedly ignored the cries for help from Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death 45 years ago? "What does it mean to create digital eyes on the street?" boyd asks.
And how would we pay attention? Would we send bots crawling through MySpace and blogs, focusing on patterns and key words associated with pain, suicide and abuse? This could be a privacy nightmare, and boyd doesn't broach that angle. But it's something society is sure to be wrestling with.
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Google dashboard: Does it enhance privacy? posted on November 5, 2009
Privacy
With a new Google dashboard, unveiled yesterday in Spain, we'll be able to monitor the information Google has about us in its various applications, from gmail to YouTube. This is the kind of disclosure privacy advocates have been calling for. I think it will enhance Google's reputation--and entice us to share more data with them (which may be the ultimate goal).
I also think this new dashboard will help Google get a better look at each one of us. Here's why. Last summer, I was having a not-for-attribution chat with a senior Google official. I asked him what Google knew about me. He told me that within Google's data centers, there were gazillionss of data bits about all of the company's users, their searches, click, emails, YouTube uploads, etc. But he said it would be loads of work to bring all of this data together and build individual profiles. What's more, it would require lots of computing, and there wasn't a clear business model for it.
UPDATE:
I just got a clarification from Google:
Its not an individual profile of the different products and doesn't
correlate the data. Instead, the Dashboard was designed to scan the
different products and services you use for a summary of the user data
they each store individually. The Dashboard does not access raw data
from the services, does not correlate any cross services data and it
does not collect or store any additional user data. And when
refreshing or closing your Dashboard page, all data is removed from the
Dashboard.
But now, there appears to be a model. To address privacy concerns, Google appears to be bringing together much of that data. And once they have it, they're much closer to a coherent look at each one of us. Perhaps there's still not a business model for such personalized data. It'll be a while before advertisers can come up with 500 million customized pitches. But who knows what correlations Google will find between our various activities. And if this dashboard generates trust, the pickings should grow even richer.
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How do you delete a file on the cloud? posted on September 11, 2009
Privacy
Let's say you put something really embarrassing on Google docs. Maybe you wake up the next morning with a vague memory of it, and then hurry to delete it. What happens to that file. Does it really get deleted? Bruce Schneier, the security expert, says no.
As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder.
You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they're generally not interested
in doing so. Sites like these are more likely to make your data
inaccessible than they are to physically delete it. Facebook is a known
culprit: actually deleting your data from its servers requires a complicated procedure
that may or may not work. And even if you do manage to delete your
data, copies are certain to remain in the companies' backup systems.
Gmail explicitly says this in its privacy notice.
This reminds me of Jonah Lehrer's description of our brain's method for deleting. He says that we don't actually forget things. Every single memory remains chemically encoded in our brains, which are virtually limitless hard disks. What happens is that we forget how to find our forgotten memories. (It's kind of like me with my keys or the ear-phones to my iPod. I don't actually lose them. I just don't know where the hell they are...)
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