I find it surprising that with all of the online chatter pre, post and during "The Great Privacy Debate" no one seems to have mentioned current happenings with Facebook and Google+. Sooner or later the online privacy debate almost always comes down to the assertion that people don't care about privacy any more, that it's gone the way of the hula hoop.
That's just nonsense and Google agrees. They learned the hard way with Google Buzz that there are lots and lots of people who want to be able to control who knows what about them. That learning is evident in the release of Google+ which has featured increased privacy protection as a major differentiator from Facebook. The point is not lost on Facebook as it scrambles to overhaul its privacy controls in response to what Google+ is offering. Of course, this sort of scrambling and backtracking on privacy is nothing new at Facebook. Do a Google search on facebook+apology+privacy and you'll get 11 million hits. It's getting harder and harder to trick people into sharing what they don't want to share, at least publically.
I'm not about to defend the Google privacy policy which has a whole set of its own problems. My point is that they at least know that privacy is an issue with people and if you want to attract and retain users you need to deal with it in a straightforward way. I expect every other social networking site knows that as well but most choose to address it only when forced. There is a lesson here for our industry as well.
The industry might need to learn the lesson very soon. Yesterday the EU indirectly published its point of view on data collection for Online Behavioral Advertising to be an Opt-In.
Posted by: Steffen | August 27, 2011 at 04:47 AM