The Digital Universe, Information Shadows, and Paying for Privacy

"The Shadow Knows" by GregStruction on Google Images

 

Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpt:  

Everywhere we turn, we encounter debates over the risks and legality of uses of “private” data by social media mega-businesses like Facebook and Twitter.  

Google is the latest culprit to be caught in the spotlight.  

The lead technology piece in Saturday’s New York Times zeroed in on Google’s violation of German privacy laws, in connection with the company’s admission that it had systematically harvested private data from households in Europe and the US since 2006 — including email content and websites visited — in the course of capturing drive-by images for Google’s Street View photo archive.  

There are already books to teach Internet privacy “survival skills” and software downloads to “erase” your data  footprint. It won’t be surprising to find that some are willing to pay generously for services that sanitize their information shadows with virtual lye and steel wool. Privacy will be a scare commodity, and its market value will rise. When privacy becomes monetized, we may assign relative values to our own private information according to the type of information that is protected or made available.  

While papers have touched on the potentially inverse relationship that exists between user privacy and the efficacy of Web 2.0 social ranking and recommendation engines, social media engines are only the beginning of what is to come …  

Read more.

Mobile Devices and Privacy — Why It’s So Easy to Swap Personal Information to Satisfy an Itch

Source: Alan Cleaver on Flickr

 

Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpts:    

What customers in all business areas increasingly require is customized, immediate information, which often involves transparency about  personal information of one sort or another.  

Privacy concerns can be raised in many settings, but often they are ultimately trumped and compromised by some pressing need or wish.  

When I’m stuck in traffic and am dying to know how to get out, I’m more than game for enabling geolocation.  

I can even hope others will drop their privacy screens.  

If I’ve been trying to corner this lobbyist or congresswoman for weeks, I want to know immediately when she comes into the Starbucks down the street.  

If I’m itching to try that no-reservations restaurant, I want to log in to see the real-time video showing who’s there and what the line looks like.  

One may eschew Twitter or Buzz strictly as navel-gazing technologies, but there are very real business utilities that can be derived from them — especially given the newly more diverse options for immediate access via any combination of devices.  

More about marketing via Twitter and mobile-enabled research.