I read a Bloomberg News article titled: “Strip-Search Case Reflects
Death of American Privacy" in which the author, Noah Feldman, states: “Privacy
is defined constitutionally by “reasonable expectation” of what should be
private. This may sound circular, but it is in fact inevitable. The concept of
privacy is inherently flexible, and the less we value it, the less our judicial
institutions will protect it for us.”
This point gets to the heart of the issue of privacy today. We are riding a wave of ‘sharing’ that
started with the advent of the ‘social network’. Clearly, this previously unmet ability to
publicize your life with friends was a latent desire of the public…a desire
that, currently, appears insatiable.
The tradeoff for all this sharing is the slow erosion of privacy. There is a shifting “reasonable expectation”
for what qualifies as “Private”, and because of this, each generation has become
more and more comfortable with the information they share. Now, this doesn’t really matter if everyone
agrees on what is public and what is private, but that is obviously not the
case (nor will it ever be). Everyone has
a different idea of what is private to them.
For me, it is my email, address, phone,
SSN, and photos, and financial data…anything else I don’t want to be public is
not on the internet.
More and more, people are starting to realize the threat that this lack
of privacy poses to their lives, and with that realization, companies are
starting to realize how important the protection of that data is. Some companies are at the forefront of this
issue, but most others lag behind. The
companies that are the most successful in this realm are those with the most to
lose. Companies like American Express
and PayPal hold extremely valuable information that, should it be compromised,
would cause immeasurable damage to the business and their reputation. In this way, the more ‘public trust’ is
linked to business success, the better an entity will do to protect its data.
The only other time companies go out of their way to protect data is
when they are at risk of being accused of mishandling ‘private’ customer
information…or they have already been exposed. This is precisely the case in the two Wall
Street Journal articles we read for class.
In the first, “Apple, Google Collect User Data,” the author shows that smartphone
apps use location data and other personal information in ways that their users
never anticipated, “in some cases sharing it with third-party companies without
the user's consent or knowledge.” Both
Apple and Google are murky about how and what they share…this is certainly
concerning given the fact that they are essentially the bellweather for how ‘private’
information will become in the future.
Certainly, there are a hundred legitimate uses for the data they collect…uses
that Google and Facebook users would certainly assign considerable value to, so
long as they are confident that the stewards of their ‘private’ information
take the utmost care to protect it.
Clearly, as is shown in the second article “A Web Pioneer Profiles
Users by Name,” some companies do not take as good care of data as their
customers thought they did. The most disturbing
aspect of the piece (to me) was how clearly the author made the point that, but
for the Wall Street Journal’s intervention, nothing
would have changed. “RapLeaf says its transmission of Facebook and MySpace IDs
was inadvertent and the practice was ended after the Journal brought it to the
company's attention. The company says people can permanently opt out of its
services at RapLeaf.com.” Why the hell
did RapLeaf need a newspaper to bring an integral part of their business “to
their attention?”
Yet again: “After the Journal asked RapLeaf whether some of its profile
segments contradicted its privacy policy, the company eliminated many of those
segments.” And even outside of RapLeaf,
there was more of the same: “About.com wasn't aware its users' email addresses
were being sent to RapLeaf.”
My personal belief is that if you share information on the internet,
you should expect that it is public. On
the other hand, we should all feel comfortable sharing certain ‘private’ information
with trusted companies and the government.
Without this trust, e-commerce would grind to a halt and the offending
companies would go down and bring the rest of the economy with them. It seems to me that a company’s ability to successfully
safeguard their customers private information should be (and in many cases is)
the most important thing a company can do in order to stay in business and
thrive. When a company gets this wrong,
it’s not just the customer who gets hurt…the ripple effects a serious and wide
reaching. Privacy should be at the top
of every CEO’s mind and clearly customers need to better inform themselves…we
can’t always rely on the Wall Street Journal to protect us.
