Privacy in the Digital Age

The article in the Guardian, "The death of privacy" , mentions the Facebook contagion experiment. I'd forgotten all about that. That quote in the article from that guy at MIT, Hidalgo, about how the Facebook News Feed is just like sausage, that really made me giggle. It's so true but we don't really let ourselves think of it that way if we can help it. Facebook took a pretty good beatdown in the media and from the public over that one. They apologized, of course. And then they amended their terms and conditions to allow data to be used as research. After they had already used it as research. 

Now that I didn't know. Sausage. Hmm. 

 And then I remembered, hey, didn't OkCupid do that same thing? Indeed they did. And then blogged about it.  Christian Rudder, data scientist and co-founder of the site, explained that well, OkCupid doesn't exactly know what it's doing. No website really does, he says. So curiosity got the better of them, I suppose. Those three experiments Rudder blogged about actually netted them some interesting data. One, that most of a user's rating is based on the photo they use on their profile, not the accompanying text. 44% of the time. Two, people will blindly trust the site to tell them who is or isn't a good match. 

According to that Pew Research study on what Americans think about data collection and security, we don't really care for this kind of thing. And apparently, the better we understand it, the less we care for it. Obviously there are excellent reasons for this. Don't we own our own data? We should have a say as far as what we share or don't share, right? Right. But I think it's sort of like that stages of grief thing. 

We’re appropriately disturbed. At first. Then we flood social media with sarcastic memes. Then we roll our eyes and go on with life because, really, what can we do about it anyway? 

A spokeswoman for Facebook was quoted as saying that “when someone signs up for Facebook, we’ve always asked permission to used their information to provide and enhance the services we offer…” And I’ll stop there. Let it sink in. Enhance the services they offer. 

We are always sold that line. It's just a little pinch. It's for your own good. 

We know better, though. The Annenberg study discussed in "Sharing Data, but Not Happily" certainly points to that. There seems to be a failure to communicate clearly there. Companies think that the freebies and discounts they hand out to consumers as consolation prizes are payment enough for the data they're harvesting, but the consumer, for the most part, doesn't agree. Not altogether surprising. We don't want to pay for free wifi with our personal information. 

We don't care to be tracked. We don't want our data gathered and sold to the highest bidder(s). We REALLY don't want anything to do with online advertisers. They're shady. 

But then again, it seems that most every online entity is. Social media. Online advertisements. Dating sites. News organizations. Especially them. They're operating under the misguided assumption that we appreciate their enhancement of our experience, and that the offer code we got for free shipping at Name Your Favorite Online Retailer was payment enough.