Privacy In An Online Age

The idea of online privacy is changing. As a consumer, there's simply some information I don't want to get out there. Phone applications like four square... Why do I want my stalkers to know where I am all the time?  I know they are out there just waiting for me to tell them how to find me. But seriously, I'm a private person and telling people where I am every second of the day feels like over share. I'm not that interesting and I don't usually find others to be either.

However as a business minded professional, I realize that kind of market research is invaluable... to someone. I haven't yet figures out to whom yet and I'm not sure what they would do with it; but to someone it’s gold.

Throughout my studies and even now, the topic of online privacy has come up. The most recent place is in an article I read about the five stages of publishing “The evolution of Book Publishing or, On the Trail to Stage Five” by Joseph J. Esposito found on www.ipda-online.org. I plan to give my thoughts on these stages in an upcoming post so stay tuned for that.

The part I will talk about here is this... the article states that small publishing companies are in a better position to go through the five stages of publishing. It’s in stage four that the issue of online privacy happens. Stage four is when publishers take a direct role in their sales and direct marketing begins. Direct marketing is collecting as much information about customers as possible, which is where online privacy comes into play; the more information given by the customers the better. But obviously, customers are afraid of giving out information like their zip codes, the number of people in a household, and the outstanding balance on a mortgage, with good reason. If the wrong people get this kind of information, there’s no telling what they would do with it (stalkers…)

But from a marketing perspective, all of this information helps publishers to sell products to their customers better. And in the end, all businesses are out to make money so…

A picture from the Google search of giant versus ant

What is needed is a standard practice for retaining and collecting information like this. There is nothing as of now because this problem has never come up before. So these small publishers have a chance to write the books, so to speak, in this area, because it takes a lot more for a giant to change directions over an ant. 

However, there is some big room for error here and in the words of Esposito, “it would be unfortunate if the organizations with the smallest regard for personal privacy set the standard”.

But publishing isn’t the only place where online security is changing. I mentioned a phone application above, soon power companies will also need a standard of information collection especially when the Smart Grid technologies come into play.  Will those policies be different? Do they need to be? Only time will tell right now. The only thing we know for sure is that as consumers we may need to understand that marketers find us the most interesting people in the world.