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Last month, my friend and noted author Julia Angwin published an op-ed piece in The New York Times asking whether privacy had become an expensive good. The article details, in part, the wide array of privacy software and hardware she’s tried. From $230 data encryption services to a $420 Internet security subscription, Julia notes that privacy may be becoming a luxury only the wealthier can afford.
She raises a very powerful question. If privacy is a luxury available only to the few, what does that mean for the average user?
First, you have to understand the sheer scale of the personal data market, its pernicious enormity. I’ve previously written about the concept of the Big Data profile, which links users like you and me to a collection of our preferences, behaviors, and tendencies – without our knowledge or consent, for purposes we probably will never know. Whether you’re trying to get pregnant or have arthritis, if you lean Democrat or Republican, if you wear a Rolex or a Swatch – online advertisers pay big money for this kind of information, which allows them to more effectively target us. Companies like Google and Facebook are happy to oblige – they make billions every year by collecting personal information and selling it to advertisers. Make no mistake, Big Data equals Big Business.
Online advertising represents the lion’s share of demand for personal information today – but it’s already so much more than that. Health care companies have begun using Big Data profiles to recruit patients for pharmaceutical studies, for example. Instead of cold calling and recruiting at hospitals, drug industry contractors now sift through personal data to look at people’s dining, spending, and entertainment preferences, which actually give them a pretty good idea of what diseases a person might have. That’s one example of how the details that Big Data traps in its net reveal intimate aspects of you and me. Big Data is already influencing and impacting your life – and there’s no going back.
Fortunately, I’m the bearer of what I believe will be good news: privacy technologies may be limited and expensive right now, but I think that won’t be the case forever.
Here’s my prediction: eventually privacy protection technologies will be subsidized and embedded in the Internet’s permafrost. Think of it like the protection for your credit card. Credit card protection wasn’t always ubiquitous. That’s no longer true. Right now, a mom in Michigan, a CEO in New York City, a janitor in Des Moines all have something in common: their credit cards have multiple layers of protection, from SSL encryption to authentication to credit card fraud detection and credit card protection.
That same development arc happened with another industry: anti-virus software. When was the last time you, as an individual, paid for anti-virus protection for your laptop, home computer, or mobile phone? I think it was about six years ago for me. Why? It’s now a standard part of what we get when we purchase hardware – they’re all equipped. The protection is now embedded. Indeed, it's such a big shift that many of the biggest anti-virus companies are busily exploring other lines of business.
I think we are going to see the same thing with privacy. Will there be differences in the protections? Of course. The wealthy will always be able to buy premium versions of everything -- privacy included – that most people can't. But privacy protections -- at least for privacy problems that we know about today -- for everyone will be increasingly strong, standardized and universal.
The real question is – how fast can that happen and why aren’t you clamoring for it right now?
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