John,
A key factor to this discussion is the fact that consumers may not give weight to the depths their privacy or data is being used/misused because they don't understand how the system works. In that sense, creating awareness around these issues is key, followed by solutions they can easily implement to make the choices right for them.
The concept of advertising based surveillance is just coming into the public's consciousness. So the reason "they may not care" is because the paradigm is new to them.
Excellent points, summarizing the immediate challenge in moving most forms of demand-driven ventures into the commercial mainstream.
Coincidently I just finished chapter 8, ‘Big Data’, in your book “Hacking Happiness: Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking it Can Change the World” where you discuss the emerging awareness among customers their ‘Little Data’ isn’t getting a fair share of the profit stream it generates and also why the unbalances matters to them. The book does a great job of popularizing many of the issues which concern this list, so hopefully it will get wide exposure.
Of course, books like yours help, as do the others who have a theme of customer empowerment, notably Doc’s (2012) and Jaron Lanier’s (2013), but their readers are typically already early adopters.
But now we have a new ally in the mainstream press which is more frequently exposing the pertinent nuances of surveillance buyers are under, like the piece starting this topic. Taken together, they all help to clarify a key distinction:
Customers face two forms of surveillance, each with distinct methods and buyer-unfriendly purposes:
(1) Commercial stalking – scrutiny purely for the sake of profit.
(2) Privacy invasion – scrutiny for the sake of collecting personal, and preferably embarrassing, information by, for example, NSA type agencies.
Although the latter sense clearly has its own significant issues deserving solutions, it’s more effective to emphasize the profit form of surveillance because it’s the one reverberating with the average customer at this particular time.
The growing trend – much in our favor – is customers recognizing a more fundamental issue than not receiving their fair share of the data profit chain: The sole reliance on stalking-for-profit as *the* method for financially sustaining the internet is increasingly deteriorating their trust and to the same degree, seriously damaging the online industry’s credibility.
Nathan Schor 305.632.1368
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From: John Havens [mailto:
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Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2014 11:07 AM
To: Guy Higgins
Cc: Graham Reginald Hill; Nathan Schor; ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: Aw: [projectvrm] How concerned SHOULD consumers be about their data? And WHY?
A key factor to this discussion is the fact that consumers may not give weight to the depths their privacy or data is being used/misused because they don't understand how the system works. In that sense, creating awareness around these issues is key, followed by solutions they can easily implement to make the choices right for them.
A modicum of privacy is defined by each user, but the idea of "privacy" for most consumers today is focused largely on existing paradigms - Norton antivirus, etc. The concept of advertising based surveillance is just coming into the public's consciousness. So the reason "they may not care" is because the paradigm is new to them. It's akin to when "we" (general consumers) learned about the concept of global warming on a large scale level. Fora a lot of people this happened with Al Gore's, "An Inconvenient Truth" and it took a few years from that point for widespread recycling to catch on.
The reason I love this group so much is it's comprised of the people trying to create awareness and the solutions moving is into an enlightened paradigm where "choice" comes within the context of transparency and genuine options to control identity.
On Oct 18, 2014, at 9:36 AM, Guy Higgins <
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From: Graham Reginald Hill <
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Date: Friday, October 17, 2014 at 1:01
To: Nathan Schor <
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Cc: ProjectVRM list <
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Subject: Aw: [projectvrm] How concerned SHOULD consumers be about their data? And WHY?
You make an interesting statement at the end of your post when you say, "users aren’t as generally concerned as we’d expect them to be about the extent of stalking". Putting aside the stalking exaggeration, WHO is we and why SHOULD we expect consumers to be more concerned about how their data is collected and used? In my experience, it is only through seeing things through consumers eyes, feelings, thoughts and actions that we have a hope of influencing them; something that the ProjectVRM as a whole has singularly failed to do.
A degree of privacy is important to me from an existential perspective. However, I am willing to trade off a degree of privacy for something of value to me, providing I have a modicum of control over how it is created. Most of these axiological decisions are relatively unimportant and are largely made without much conscious thought being required on my part. And I am heavily influenced by a wide range of cognitive biases. I suspect that most other consumers behave similarly. The work of Gazzaniga, Damasio, Kahneman and others suggest that this is probably true. Of course, individual consumers trade-off privacy, value and control is up to them, individually.
Best regards from Bishopsgate, London, Graham
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 16. Oktober 2014 um 19:46 Uhr
Von: "Nathan Schor" <
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An: "ProjectVRM list" <
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Betreff: [projectvrm] All your social media posts now sorted by location and up for sale
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/15/all-your-social-media-posts-are-now-in-the-public-domain-forever
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/15/geofeedia-geolocates-your-social-media-postings-reaps-3-5m/
‘Without question, Geofeedia has the potential as a game changer. That’s because its software filters, analyzes, and then geolocates your social media postings, all in real time, in any town, city, or country. In other words, anything you post on Twitter or Instagram, for example, is tagged, with your name on it, for the world to see.’
“We’re not hiding anything or doing things we shouldn’t be doing. We are an aggregator of public information, and we are making it easier to aggregate that information. So there’s no privacy concern from our end,” their CEO said.
No one on this list will be surprised by those quotes from the above posts, describing a product that sorts all your social media posts by location and puts then up for sale to any and all bidders, tagged, with your name on it, for the world to see.’
But that last italicized phrase – up for sale to any and all bidders, tagged, with your name on it, for the world to see – may be quite helpful to our cause because it makes crystal clear an aspect that is usually ignored about the surveillance every customers is constantly under: It’s just not the actual stalking that is potentially damaging to csutomers, but much more problematic is the results are available to anyone.
Perhaps then as part of our marketing strategy to a wider audience, we should make a bigger point of how easily (and forever) accessible location information now is to anyone paying a minimal fee.
IMHO, since users aren’t as generally concerned as we’d expect them to be about the extent of stalking, then perhaps the promiscuous availability of the results to anyone is a credible candidate to join the legitimate issues (along with their kids, cars, and cats) customers wake up every morning worrying about,. So emphasizing the available to anyone message is more likely to incentivize change.
Nathan Schor 305.632.1368
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