A couple of years ago I had lunch at a New York restaurant with an older gentlemen trying to pitch my startup. My lunch partner was a wealthy Israeli born who had a long illustrious and (mostly) secret career in security and intelligence. I was pitching hard the social aspects and sharing capabilities of our innovative platform. The man looked at me, glossy eyed, and said: “I don’t get it. Why would people want to share all this stuff?” I retorted with the following: “You sir are a very private person, yet your resume is publicly available on LinkedIn. Why?”
The explanation to a secretive person publicly publishing his resume on LinkedIn encapsulates the broader matter of privacy. In fact ‘privacy’ is too amorphous I usually prefer ‘private information’. In the era of internet, information has become a commodity, just look at Google. Like oil drilling Google practically sucks every piece of information they can make sense off, monopolizing the information well. I dare you to find an investor to a search engine venture. The great thing about the internet is that it keeps revealing or even creating new information types. Web 2.0 changed the unidirectional browsing experience into an interactive dialog, which in turn created the social-networks. After a short time Facebook monopolized that field, doing to social what Google did to search. Smartphones, those beautiful tiny computers loaded with sensors, brought on new types of information to play with. One of the latest is location. Knowing what people do and where they do it is extremely valuable information. There are some candidates, such as Foursquare, to take over that information field but no clear winner yet.
This evolution in information has swept society, grabbing people’s private information in the process and packaging it into a tradable-bond of sorts. Everyone in the high tech industry knows this, private information equals value, that’s in essence why investors love traction (private information needs quantity to be of value). I wont’s go into complicated valuation mathematics, but the bottom line is that each user and the information retrieved about him or her has a value tag. How is private information monetized? There are many ways to convert information into dollars, but simply put – the more they know about you the better they can sell you stuff.
So why would one willingly provide private information knowing all this? Simple, most people don’t know or care on how the information is traded and used. The trick is in clear value and quick gratification. When you check-in to compete with your friends and get medals, you play the game without caring how the information is traded or used behind the scenes. When you post your resume on LinkedIn you seek networking and job opportunities, losing control over that information is the price you pay. You can’t be the only dressed person in a nudist beach.
In January 2010 Mark Zuckerberg claimed ‘Privacy Is Dead‘, I think not, it just got valuable. When privacy is dead we will move on to the next source of information.
Image credit: cheezburger.com