Fishburn Hedges

12.01.2011 | (2 comments)

The debate over privacy was a recurrent theme in 2010. Google came under fire when it emerged that Street View cars had captured wifi data from thousands of households. Facebook faced similar criticism when it was revealed that popular applications on the site had shared user data with internet tracking organisations. And Santander became the latest in a list of institutions that compromised customer information by sharing it with, well, the wrong customers.

But, without a doubt, the single biggest game-changer in the debate about privacy was WikiLeaks. The debate still rages. On the one hand, many admire Assange’s mission to ‘make an enemy of secrecy itself’. On the other, critics point to the hugely damaging consequences that can arise from mass disclosure of such sensitive data. Suddenly we have to ask ourselves: is anything really sacred anymore?

From the perspective of consumers, it would be naïve to think that our lives are as private as they once were. As retailers monitor our shopping habits, CCTV captures our movements and social networking leaves an indelible online record of our personal and professional lives, privacy begins to feel like a somewhat outdated concept.

And why worry, you might say? There are lots of flipsides to sharing our personal information. I for one am more than happy to cash in the points on my Boots Advantage Card and life without Google Maps seems hard to imagine. On a more serious note, as a Londoner who is regularly out and about late in the evening, the presence of CCTV cameras is a welcome security measure.

For me, the bigger issue is whether the organisations that gather, store and share our data are as open as they might be about what they are doing with it. It’s one thing to shout about the benefits we can enjoy but another thing entirely to be honest about the potential risks that sharing our data can have. One of the biggest challenges authorities and regulators face is to design ways that we can understand how data about us is used, and practically address any privacy issues we identify.

Perhaps self-regulation is a more viable alternative. Facebook, for example, has made some big promises about ensuring its privacy settings are easy to understand and manipulate but not everyone is convinced this goes far enough.

Overcoming this cynicism will be a big challenge in 2011. Transparency may be daunting for big brands but if they want to maintain consumer trust in the long-term it’s hard to see what the alternative is. Ultimately it should be down to the individual to decide how hard they want to work to retain their privacy and it’s impossible to make that choice without knowing all of the facts.

On January 18^th, I’ll be listening to Lord McNally, Minister of State for Justice, debating “What’s Next… for Privacy in the Digital Age?” with Anthony House from Google and Channel 4’s Ben Cohen.

Like many of my colleagues I have been watching the debate closely as it evolved through 2010 – even before the WikiLeaks controversy came to the fore – and am intrigued to hear where our speakers think it will go next in 2011.

In the case of WikiLeaks the argument shows no sense of cooling – the drive to combat secrecy is a powerful one. When it comes to the rest of us, I suspect that the pace of technological change means that the nature of personal privacy has already changed forever. The danger is that this change happens by stealth, with consumers an unwitting agent in the erosion of their own privacy. If we want to attack secrecy anywhere, I would argue this is a good place to start. 

Posted by Anna Haslam

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on 19.01.2011

Anna Haslam :-
Thanks for the comment. That’s an interesting example. I agree this is a huge challenge for consumers. Interestingly, at our privacy debate yesterday, there was a lot of agreement that the big challenge for companies and social networks is how to help people understand the complex nature of privacy without blinding them with science. Fascinating subject – I think this debate will run and run.

on 14.01.2011

David Gray :-
I think it will become very difficult to maintain privacy in the digital age. Indeed, I noticed a few months ago that Rory Cellan-Jones performed a little experiment on Facebook to see how much it knew about a single individual. This person had never interacted with the website before; however when he opened an account for her, Facebook immediately suggested people who she would like to befriend, whom she already knew. Thus, even though she was not interested in that website, it already had an interest in her.