In the article Privacy-Enhanced
Personalization, questions are posed about the future of privacy in an
increasingly personalized digital realm. Privacy was once thought to be in a
reciprocal trade-off with personalization, with increasing in one resulting in
decreases in the other. This idea is outdated as personalization, especially
with the use of metadata and compilers, results in many more factors that
affect what is lost and what is gained, and by whom. As far as relinquishing
privacy, there is a positive association between age, education, and income,
and stated concerns over Internet privacy. The result is three groups of
privacy ideologies, those of the privacy fundamentalists, who are hard pressed
to reveal anything, those of the privacy unconcerned, who think very little on
their disclosure decisions, and the privacy pragmatists, a middle ground
between the two. At a ratio of 1:1:2, privacy pragmatists compose the majority
and will most likely continue to do so. Personalization provides people many
benefits, the most important of which are time savings, money savings, and a
third factor muddled among pleasure, customized content, and saved preferences.
Most people are willing to disclose their basic demographic information as well
as their personal preferences and lifestyles, while very few are easily coaxed
into revealing financial or contact information, which is most easily used for
identity theft. A staggering 94 percent of those surveyed believe they have the
right to know everything a website knows about them, a logical expectation. One
of the instrumental factors that must be established between information
collector and information provider, the user, is trust. Elements such as
positive past experiences, refinement of website design and performance, email
confirmation of transactions, as well as the reputation of the website operator
are all key ingredients to the building of an online relationship. Many people
also prefer to see a privacy statement as well as a privacy seal in order to
reassure themselves that they are in fact protected. Over 40 countries have
worked to establish stringent privacy laws to ensure the protection of users.
Technology has also been developed in order to enhance the privacy of
personalized systems, such as pseudonym usage to identify users rather than
their actual name, as well as the ability for users to store their metadata on
their own computer. One question that I could not get out of my head revolves
around complete disclosure between collector and user related to their data. If
huge companies such as Google and Facebook provided users with all the data
they have collected about them, as well as the many third-party uses, would
this actually result in a better relationship or completely appall most users
who have only minimal ideas about what these databases contain?
Dylan,
ReplyDeleteAs you mentioned, and as the article states, 94 percent of people interviewed believe that they need to know everything that he website knows about them. However, this is hardly the case. I feel like many times they even know more about what we share to them. Regarding your question, I think it’s a great question. Big companies such as Google and Facebook have so much information. Not only they have the greatest number of users, but also to be part of their databases, you have to disclose very personal information. And to be honest, is quit scary what they might know about you. Facebook, for example, there are a lot of pictures our there that even though when you delete them, they are still on their database although the public might not be able to see them. Also, Google has every single search that we have ever made. If we look up things in Google while we are sign in into our email, they can go back and check everything we have searched. In regard to this, one of the problems is that not every user has the knowledge to understand what they are doing when they sing into any of these two main databases. I have seen people that have their address, phone, personal interest etc. on Facebook without realizing what they are sharing not only to others, but also the Facebook as a whole. To answer your question, I don’t honestly know if that would actually result in a better relationship or completely appall most users. I think it depends of what kind of user are you, your use of it, and how much information you have shared during your time as user. I am interested to see the outcome.
Answering the question you posed at the end of your response, I do think that if companies provided users with the data they collected about them, it would result in a better relationship between the two. I am sure that once users get to thinking about privacy, we all will – at some point – blow things out of proportion. So if the data companies gather from us is any less shocking than what we expect, we will see it as a positive thing. The only case where users would be appalled would be if a company somehow got hold of extremely private information. In that case, I would think that the user would probably cancel his or her membership with that company due to a lack of trust.
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