There's a lot of sound and fury these days about privacy and the Net--about how your privacy is going to be seriously compromised soon, if it's not already; about how innovations in mobile phones and global positioning satellite systems (GPSS) are going to reveal our innermost thoughts and lives; and about how our personal data is going to be sold on every street corner, to all comers.
I think this is all more than a little overstated. I think a lot of our impending forfeit of some privacy, which I agree lies ahead, is going to be quite voluntary. And the forfeit of privacy won't be accompanied by nearly so much Sturm und Drang as the privacy paranoiacs expect.
Take my privacy, please!
I have to be careful not to be a hypocrite here. I like my privacy. My phone numbers are unlisted; I practically never give my mobile phone number to anyone. I get plenty of junk calls already, thanks, despite that effort. And I usually decline to provide a street address on forms I'm presented; I already accumulate piles of junk snail mail every day, the vast majority of which is thrown away unopened.
But do I feel threatened about losing my privacy over the Net? No, and I don't expect to anytime soon. I think we're in the early stages of redefining how we think about privacy. And privacy changes will be driven by what I think will be a very reasonable compromise: we'll accept appealing incentives of value and convenience, and in return, we'll give up some privacy.
I don't mind that exchange when I'm willing to fill out a personal-profile form, or when I get to use a Web site that delivers real value to me. (I usually turn down a site's invitations to send me occasional great-value offers from other "trusted" companies, because I want to be the one trusting them, but so far, I haven't encountered any problems.) And if I don't trust a Web site? I don't fill out the profile. It's that simple.
And when third-generation mobile phones with wap micro-browsers in them are available next year, and I can do mobile commerce from them, I want a trusted third party holding my credit card information for the vendors I use--or maybe some of the vendors themselves--because I don't want the nightmare of repeatedly inputting my credit card number, expiration date, and account name from a tiny telephone keypad.
And when I can get occasional market alerts or offers on that phone and accept or discard them with a single button-push, that's just fine with me, too.
The reality is, there's a secret here the privacy worriers don't seem to have caught on to: I can turn the damned phone off when I want to. My mobile phone is off a lot of the time already, since I see it mainly as a tool for me to place rather than receive calls. Nothing changes.
Mind your own database
In fairness, some of the privacy worries are about aggregation of data: Source A gets its data on me together with that from Sources B, C, and D, and together they produce a profile containing more information, made more widely available, than I'd like. I do worry about that, but not to the hysterical Luddite extreme of condemning all profiling and auto-locating.
I recall Sun cofounder Scott McNealy's crack a couple of years ago: "You don't have any privacy anymore--get used to it!" That was crudely overstated, but as technology advances, we are going to be rethinking the meaning of personal privacy.
