In ‘Privacy vs Trust’, Trust Wins
Over at Search for Better Search, the topic of conversation is “Winning Users’ Trust”. They’ve got an all-star list of heavy hitters weighing in: John Battelle, Om Malik, Michael Arrington, etc. I was struck by the fact that, for the majority of the commentators, trust was a much bigger issue than data. It didn’t seem to matter what information search engines stored, as long as they were transparent and gave users control:
John Battelle: The way they can do this is by giving their users access to, and editing permissions over, the data they keep.
Gary Price: Transparency is key… For search engines to sustain user trust, they must be transparent about the filtering they use to display results, capture information and disclose biases.
Michael Arrington: User trust is built by giving users control…
Richard MacManus: I think the number one best practice is to engage the community and have conversations with them… Once that starts to happen, people begin to trust corporations more.
Dr Riza Berkan: Search engines must openly declare what they are doing with the data and all tracking devices, almost like a confession.
Ars Technica: The compliment (sic) of power must always be control; a search engine that learns from you must also trust you by you giving you the tools to curate and prune your search history and to opt-out at will.
Matt Marshall: Somehow you’ve got to protect identities, and if you’re collecting information about us, you should let us know what you’re collecting, and where to find it.
Only one person, Om Malik, had anything at all to say about whether corporations should be storing data at all:
Search engines have to make it clear that they don’t store any data whatsoever. The only way they can do that is if search is their only business. Email, personalized home pages, mobile clients, IM clients, search history - they are the enemies of private searching.
I don’t know about you, but I found this really interesting. There’s a big difference between people not wanting their information shared at all and being able to control when and with whom it gets shared. If search engines follow Om’s worldview, then trust is a non-issue (presuming you believe that they’re not out-and-out lying about not storing data). If you don’t have any of my data, it doesn’t matter whether or not I trust you to protect it from subpoenas or hackers—you can’t give them what you don’t have.
If search engines listen to everyone else, on the other hand, one of the single most critical factors for web businesses over the next few years will be the ability to engender trust.
These two concepts are vastly different in practice. If trust is more important than privacy, then a company that says up front, “We collect all of your search history and use it to target you directly,” will do better than a company that says, “We will not use your search history for anything other than making our algorithm better, and oh by the way those ads today that match your search query from two weeks ago? Pure coincidence.”
In other words, it’s not what they do. It’s whether they keep their word.
Which is more important to you? Trust or privacy? Cast your vote to find out what other people think!
October 16th, 2007 at 3:26 am
[…] far 100% of the people who’ve voted in yesterday’s poll prioritize trust over […]
October 16th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Keeping records. What about it? The horse has left the barn. Many are overcome. Some already have given up. There’s now too many records. Some already have abandoned their privacy. Many have created new persona. As if they say, “Why worry? When an avatar breaks its silence, only an avatar remains.”
A few are worried. Michael Geist reminds us that the two pillars of privacy are 1) Notice and 2) Consent. His authoritative legal analysis shows these pillars are falling. The Information Commissioner of the British Parliament, Richard Thomas, warns us that he is not being trite about how easily we are stumbling into Big Brother, where data and surveillance becomes our government.
Domain is at stake.
We cannot forget sovereignty.
Over centuries we learned to repel intrusion. First its violence, then its arrogance, then second our safe living and finally our pride. We earned our privacy in order to respect ourselves.
Twenty-five years ago at a computer conference in Vancouver I asked that “information sovereignty” be part of the computer revolution. I was promoting a video-text version of online medical records; damn old fashioned! But still we have not demanded a society that is capable of protecting us.
Of course I am an avatar. My avatar. And I am a protected person too. All belong are us.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:41 am
Brian,
Your mention of Big Brother raises an interesting question: does privacy only refer to protection from government intrusion? My concept of Big Brother incorporates not only an invasion of privacy, but also a world in which citizens are manipulated and frightened into inhuman submission. Imagine if a society had total transparency in addition to a prying government. It would be impossible to oppress the citizenry.
McCarthy became a frightful figure not because he invaded people’s privacy but because he leveraged people’s fear and turned it into neighborly mistrust. If information were out in the open, mistrust might be harder to come by.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should adopt the Aikido approach we discussed so long ago and fling open the doors to their most intimate activities. But the question of privacy does go far beyond the government. In the case of Big Brother, one way to protect is to not allow the government to access our information. The other way to protect is to allow everyone to access it.
If it were down to those two choices, which one would you prefer?
November 5th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
The November Carnival Of Trust…
Kaila Colbin noticed a pattern among heavy-hitter reviewers of search engines?they implicitly rated trust, transparency and honesty higher than the non-collection of data. “If trust is more important than privacy, then a company that says up front, …
November 6th, 2007 at 12:50 am
[…] The poll I ran recently supported this position, with 100% of respondents saying trust was more important than privacy. […]