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Thank You For Sharing
The explicit - and not so explicit - agreements we make for our personal data
In many ways, the Web divides along generational lines - not so much in terms of who is using it, but how. And perhaps the biggest divergence comes in the way we manage our personal information.
Older folks, schooled in Orwellian visions of Big Brother and identity theft, worry about risks like job offers being compromised by MySpace indiscretions, and so tend to guard their privacy with vigilance. But younger generations, especially those too young to work, are only too quick to offer up stories online that make their parents (and other adults) cringe.
You don't have to Twitter your latest excesses, though: We're actually sharing information about ourselves every time we go online, if only by the pages we click and the sources of data we consume. So the question is more, what kind of society are we creating with all this tacit consent?
A Bargain Broken
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Since so much of our communication as a society is going through digital channels, and because our keystrokes, searches and links convey immediate and irrevocable information, our actions are speaking volumes - and, increasingly, that communication is happening in a highly public place. In a recent New York Times article, social media analyst and IdeasProject ideator Clay Shirky wonders if we may be losing some ability to distinguish between what's public and what's private. "We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn't see, because it was hidden," he says, "and behavior we could see, because it was public." Shirky laments that the "bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption." |
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How should we we be dealing with this dichotomy? Rather than simply taking much of the negative data we find at face value, Shirky suggests that we learn as a society to exercise restraint in regards to all the information at our disposal.
Other ideators see a similar dynamic. Christine Herron, a Principal with early-stage venture firm First Round Capital, compares the Internet to village life. "In a small town," she says, "pretty much everyone knew what was going on. They knew if you were having a fight with your spouse. They knew if your kid was the kid that threw eggs. There was no hiding your personal [life] from your employer... By going online you're getting some of the transparency that you had in a small town culture - only we're having it everywhere." And, of course, it's all being kept in our "permanent records."
Helping Customers Help Themselves
It's not just individuals who should consider modifying their uses of all that online data: According to consumer data analyst Andreas Weigend, companies would do well to exercise such restraint in regards to personal information about their customers. "It's not about snooping up behind the consumer, getting their digital exhaust, and then selling the stuff they don't want," he says. Our trust and our willingness to surrender data might also grow if businesses used that information to create products we actually wanted. "The companies that will be successful," says Weigend, "are those who manage to enroll the consumer in helping them and helping themselves."
"By going online you're getting some of the transparency that you had in a small town culture - only we're having it everywhere." - Christine Herron, First Round Capital
Web visionary and student of customer behavior Doc Searls takes it a step further. "You're more likely to be a loyal customer if [businesses] don't interrogate you and make things difficult for you." Instead of the current system of companies trolling for information then barraging customers with "targeted" mailings and spam, Searls envisions a complete turning of the tables, where the customer provides not only data, but the wisdom to control its use. "What's going to happen," says Searls, "[is] something called VRM, [or] vendor relationship management. It's the reciprocal of customer relationship management. It's where the customer controls their information. We become, as a customer, the integration point for our own data, our transaction histories, our credit histories, our preferences, and then the origination point for the way those are used."
Sharing Rules
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Social media analyst and best-selling author Charlene Li outlines a methodology for personal data sharing that is unobtrusive yet relevant to our needs. "Social algorithms," she says. "That can tease out what is important in our lives." Our inclination to trust such a system rises only when we see that its usefulness outweighs concerns we might have about being compromised. "The more you use it," Li explains, "the smarter it gets and the more useful it will become to you." |
Still, users want control over what they surrender and when. In the more sophisticated scenario described by Li, "The algorithm will start to help give you some more control over that, basically, making it easier to assign permissions; basically, doing it for you." Who we trust to do this remains an issue. Just as we don't trust all people, we do not necessarily want all the businesses, institutions and strangers we interact with on the Web to have our information. As a result, we're still a long ways from the kind of control over our information that Li or Doc Searls envisions.
"What we need are social algorithms that can tease out what is important in our lives...The more you use it, the smarter it gets and the more useful it will become to you." - Charlene Li, author
As renowned cyber law scholar Jonathan Zittrain reminds us, "Our technology has outpaced our social development, and our ability to build the kinds of social and cultural structures around the new technology that tend to temper and channel its use." So, while Facebook may assure us that our information is private, and the checkout screen at Amazon insists that our credit card number is secure, Google is still storing our keystrokes and search information at an undisclosed locale in the digital universe. "The government, in particular," says policy innovator Kevin Werbach, "is just awakening to the potential of the data it has."
It Takes a Village?
Ultimately, it all comes down to awareness and trust - awareness of where and how our information is being used, and having the right kinds of agreements and technologies in place that allow us to trust it will be used as we'd prefer. As we've said, young people will likely continue being less discrete, and the older crowd will continue to worry about the consequences of all this sharing. But if Christine Herron is right, and the Internet is more like the village of old, then perhaps it will take a village - or rather, a community of people, both young and old, enabled by the right kinds of technology - to ensure that we'll share and share alike.
Copyright 2009 by IdeasProject
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