According to a recent survey cited by Microsoft 85% of Americans are concerned about their online privacy, yet few take action to alleviate their concern. Although Microsoft’s step to educate consumers on the privacy issue is a good start they are missing the point. The problem lies not with the consumers, but with the companies who relentlessly exploit their data in devious ways without consumers fully understanding the extent of the problem.
In one of Microsoft’s brochures they summarize the problem quite well:
“…unlike in-person conversations, after you post online — texts, blogs, comments, tweets, snapshots, links — it may remain there forever. The site may archive your post, people may keep it and share it, companies may sell it, or security lapses may expose it. That means it may be available to future employers, friends, bank loan officers, and others with consequences for your reputation that you may be unable to imagine. It’s also important to know that hackers, spammers, identity thieves, and other criminals could misuse the information you disclose to tarnish your reputation, harass you, steal your identity, or ruin your credit.”
Most of the same Americans who are concerned about their privacy still share massive photo libraries and other personal details on Facebook. In fact, 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, 1/3 of them with personally identifying tags. As of October last year 219 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook.
How does this happen? How can we on one side observe that 85% of Americans are concerned about online privacy, yet still 300 million new photos are shared every single day?
For starters, it is clear that people enjoy sharing special moments with friends! Additionally there are many people who still don’t understand Facebook’s privacy settings, and who haven’t made the effort to make the necessary adjustments.
However, I believe the real reason behind this lack of congruency is three-fold:
People don’t understand the extent of the business behind sale of private information that underlies the online ecosystem
Most of people’s friends are already on Facebook so it is the easiest way to share photos with friends
No real private sharing alternative exists
What privacy advocates need to do is to get off their slow-motion train of only applying traditional methods of influence and embrace that in order to fight technology they need to employ technology themselves. We need better technology that allows us to share without being exploited.
In order to get private data back where they belong — into the hands of the consumers, and not in countless anonymous companies and private persons deploying apps — we need to deploy solutions that enables private sharing with real friends.
We need a consumer product that allows them to share their data from their own device that they themselves control — a set top box in the hands of the consumer where you can make your content available when you want, for how long you want and shared with whom you want. When you hit the OFF button — it is no longer available. It needs to integrate with social media so that notifications of new content could be broadcast conveniently — but it should point to data stored on a device in complete control by the consumer.
Cloud technology, traditional social networks and P2P Technology misses the target here — we need IPv6 deployed and internet providers to open up so that the set-top box can function as an individual web-server available whenever you want it to be available.
The lack of congruence between privacy concern and the actual amount of information shared will not exist forever. I believe that the combination of increased IPv6 deployment, consumer awareness and new technology will lead to a giant rise in personal storage — bringing the data back where it belongs.
Vik Bulletin 