Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis

Author:Jeff Jarvis [Jarvis, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Privacy, Retail, Technology, US, Internet
ISBN: 1451636008
Google: djTOx4cnfhsC
Amazon: B00740FU4U
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-09-26T22:00:00+00:00

The Sharing Industry

The Public Economy

“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive,” says entrepreneur Sam Lessin. “Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”1 You pay for privacy in the effort and hassle it takes to manage privacy settings. You also pay in the opportunity lost if you choose not to be public and social. On the other side of the ledger, you can be rewarded—with attention, influence, information, deals—if you reveal yourself. This new economy tilts toward publicness.

There is money to be made in privacy. At more than one conference, I’ve watched the blossoming of a regulatory/industrial privacy complex. At the 2011 Reboot Privacy and Security Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, a vendor selling web security software to companies went through his PowerPoint reciting some of the statistics I listed earlier, but with a darker tone. He announced that hundreds of millions of people were using Facebook. He paused … dramatically. Then he said, “Scary.” Why is that scary? He didn’t say. He didn’t think he had to. Scare and sell is his strategy. A government regulator took the stage and demonized Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Google’s Schmidt, whom she misquoted, telling the audience that Schmidt had dismissed privacy as irrelevant. She bragged about making more regulations and adding more staff. Scare and spend. I met the head of an association of chief privacy officers. Bet your membership is growing, I said. By the thousands, he replied. Scare and grow. There are venture capital funds targeting opportunities in the privacy industry. Scare and invest.

I’ve seen the same dynamic play out at the MediaBistro.com Digital Privacy Forum in New York and the 2010 Privacy Identity Innovation (PII) conference in Seattle, where I dragged son Jake. A conference participant tweeted that two days at the meeting “makes me realize that the Internet safety talk w/my kids will be just as important as the sex talk.”2 True enough. But if our kids know more than we think they do about sex, they certainly know more than we do about the social internet. My son couldn’t take all the hand-wringing. We escaped to lunch and he told me these people see problems where they don’t exist. Show me how the world is falling apart, he demanded. He wanted to ignore them. I cautioned him that they could implement regulations that would change how the services he loves operate or make them too expensive to continue. I heard regulators there muse about extending the protections of COPPA—America’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act—past thirteen years of age to eighteen. That would mean services like Facebook would need parents’ written permission to hold any personal information (such as names and locations) even for high school students. What it would mean in practical terms is that companies would avoid building services for teenagers—that’s why there are so few for preteens. Privacy regulation will have a big impact on business. Privacy is also becoming big business.

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