Privacy is valuable. Value it, consciously, and spend it, wisely.

Found, @Newseum, Washington DC

Privacy is a conversational black hole. “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.” (link)

We all love to talk about privacy. The reality, however, is that:

Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life.

Few people truly value privacy.
Seriously. We all value privacy in the big, philosophical, fundamental “human right to privacy”, in the sense that we agree that it’s important, and we hold the idea near and dear to our heart, and we’ll get upset, justifiably, if our right to privacy is violated.

But few people value the marginal costs and benefits to privacy at the granular level that would allow us to make reasoned decisions about what we choose to share and not share. What’s the price of privacy? What’s the value of publicity?

Example: do you consciously think about the pros and cons, the marginal value and benefit, the full impact of what you share on the web, or a Tweet, a Facebook post, a Flickr picture or a blog post? Do you consider what could happen in the short and long-term?

No. Why? In many ways, we can’t.

We haven’t developed these heuristics yet. Our guts are still figuring out the equations that compress a lot of information and thought into a “gut call” about the impact of what we do online.

It’s hard. And as Alan Patrick has pointed out many times over the past two years, widespread adoption of web services have contributed to privacy erosion. Fundamentally, individual users don’t have the power, incentive or ability to reliably influence how companies use our data, thus our data is free but everywhere in chains. Companies haven’t given us enough information or guidance about how our data is (and will be) used, we evaluate each decision on the margin without considering how all our decisions add up, and we undervalue our privacy, making poor decisions about how we use web services.

But of course, not only do we get something for using those services, but we also get something for spending our privacy.

My comment to my friend Jim Goldstein on his post Privacy: You’ve Just Given It Away What Next?

What about the value of making something public?

There are valuable, tangible, even measurable benefits to making information public. As long as it’s within our control, and we can value the benefits and costs of our decisions, that’s all that matters. Private, public, whatever.

The issue isn’t about privacy per se, but control over data, where it goes, who sees it, putting it into (and taking it out of) the stream of information that people see, interact with, and act upon.

But this is a conversation we’ve had before :)

I share what I choose to share because it creates the friction that brings people and passions together. It’s not the only way, and I don’t share everything: but I share what I share because I think the benefits are worth the costs. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ll learn by doing and testing. I’ll learn by spending my privacy.

Wisely, of course.

How? Consider the misplaced debate about privacy; the real debate is over control, not privacy.

Noah Brier, Stalked? Not Really: Noah Brier Responds:

At the end of the day a breach of privacy requires some reasonable expectation that something would be kept private. Not only did I not have that expectation, but for much of the information I put on the web I hope for exactly the opposite.

Exactly.

We don’t just “give away privacy.”
We use services and exchange our time, money and attention to get something back from using that service. There’s a value exchange there. We’re explicitly opt-ing in to use the service under those terms, good and bad. Don’t like it? Quit.

Why did “quit Facebook day” flop? Because even if we don’t like how Facebook handles their product decisions, privacy settings, etc., we get enough value out of using it that it’s worth it to put up with the pain.

Remember that Facebook is a business. Their choice on how to manage privacy is a business decision. As my buddy Ethan put it:

“The business model they appear to be pursuing makes Facebook’s interest to erode/obfuscate privacy *just* to the marginal point before which there would be a mass exodus. No more “privacy”, no less.”

And to be honest, we shouldn’t expect Facebook to look at it in any other way. It’s up to us, the market, the aggregate of all of us, to tell Facebook what we want. Not just tell, but to *do*. What we do indicates what we agree on; markets are aggregations of actions. That’s how a market works, whether it’s a market based on money, attention or any other measure of value. And if enough people don’t like it, or use it, or pay for it (depending on the business model), then it won’t be successful, and it won’t exist.

And the fact that we didn’t quit en mass says something pretty powerful.

Yes, Facebook “should” make it easy for people to manage how their data flows. But I argue it’s not because of morals or ethics, but just good business.

Granted, increasingly, in many ways today opt-ing out of technology is opt-ing out of society. We’re drawn into using some services because we simply have to. But we can still choose how we use them.

Underlying this is a powerful investment opportunity. More personal data, services, networks and connections creates the opportunity for better curators, filters, blockers, and routers of data. The value in content isn’t in content but in how it flows, how it gets added to, remixed, rerouted, represented.

But that’s a thought for another day.