Is the Age of Privacy Really Over?
Online social connections are at an all-time high, with multiple services at a user’s disposal. Businesses and individuals are benefiting from the personal and professional contacts, online networking, and user data collected and processed through various tracking mechanisms.
Strategies and businesses concerned with search engine optimization, collaborative filtering engine, and big data analytics are picking up steam in helping organizations establish their online presence, solidify their executional processes, and draw meaningful inferences from the large sets of user data to bring them closer to the end users.
While there are clear positives from all of these interactions, end users always have concerns about whether too much information is being extracted from them and whether the data is being appropriately shared and used. Facebook, a company often mentioned in the context of privacy, spoke about this a couple of years back. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned if Facebook were to be re-created today, several data points about a user would be made public to align with current social norms.
While user shared information is one form of deriving user data, another major medium is mobile devices running Wi-Fi and data plans, which enable cell phone companies to track user whereabouts and user actions such as types of purchases and online activity. Nordstorm was tracking user information and very recently stopped due to user concerns about privacy.
Periodically we hear news about how users raise concerns over privacy issues via forums, groups, or even through extreme measures—such as when one user jail broke his Kindle to directly write to Jeff Bezos to update him on his reading patterns.
A recent study conducted by All State/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll details how Americans feel and know that they have lost their privacy but that it is inevitable in the current technology age. The study talks about various sources through which user information is collected and the generational divide—the current generation of those under thirty is more comfortable sharing their data than those above thirty.
In addition to concerns about collecting user data, a more important aspect is how users believe that such data is being shared without their consent. It is heartening to see organizations such as Microsoft take this up with the US Government and appeal for more transparency with the public about its data sharing practices.
From an implementation standpoint, upholding user privacy needs cooperation from several entities, especially when social presence is only going to surge further:
- An empathy toward end users from organizations in what kind of information is being collected, used, and shared
- A strong focus from development and test organizations in implementing robust practices in safeguarding user privacy
- More importantly, an information decision from users in understanding the privacy policies of the services they use and deciding where to draw the line on what they want to share
