When does free stop feeling like free online?
My Web Ecology colleague Sara is moderating a panel at SXSW this year on how free services online are not free because you are paying for the service by willingly offering your data to them. The businesses benefit through improving their services by 1) learning your user behavior to improve the service and 2) adding your data and connecting your network to the benefit of all network users (network / scale effect).
We discussed this topic this morning in Boston at Web Ecology Camp 6 and the conversants brought up a lot of cost-benefit analysis suggestions around the question of whether users being more informed of this trade-off might adjust their behavior because of the loss of privacy or support of private interests through data they didn’t realize they were voluntarily contributing to the service or related services offered by the service provider. These are most relevant to the services people use most online: Google, Facebook, etc.
An enormous number of people use such services, and their value is heavily derived from the people offering their data to improve it. As Google tracks more or your online actions via Google Analytics and everyday search behavior, and Facebook offers their Connect platform to every other social or nascently social site on the web, the question of “How free is free?” becomes more relevant to any individual online.
I started by thinking about this in terms of “social contract” developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, where citizens cede certain personal freedoms assuming others will also in order to generate the public good of protection by the state. Locke’s limited government idea suggests that we stop at some point in where we ceded this control to the government. In other words, there is a tipping point separating ideal government from Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Exchanges online might have a similar tipping point: where free stops feeling like free to users. To continue with the government metaphor, The Patriot Act is a curious example. On the one hand, we started ceding extraordinary freedoms to the US federal government in exchange for perceived protection from terrorism. But this got too personal, too invasive to some when the attention turned to spaces like library records where we expect that our loan records are safe from Big Brother-like data systems. People responded very negatively to this and law suits were produced and people fought the system.
At the same time, a lot of people didn’t really feel the impact on their personal privacy. It didn’t affect them and they just proceeded according to a new norm, a new role of government in your life which you weren’t really aware if you it didn’t touch you. This is where I think human adaptability, a survival instinct, plays a large role in the question. We humans are empowered by cognitive dissonance and adjusting to new environments in order to survive. Most Americans adjusted to the new norm of The Patriot Act and even if they were unsettled by the idea possible invasions to their privacy, they moved on with their lives. This is what allows people to function in dictatorial regimes or even individual predilections toward nihilism. Most people are pragmatic and move on.
So to answer the question of “Will knowing about how much personal data is collected by these companies change individuals behavior?” it probably falls into the same vein as The Patriot Act. People who can’t cope through cognitive dissonance will change their behavior and advocate for a reversal of the trend of greater invasions of privacy or loss of personal freedom. But these are massively outnumbered by the people that will simply move on with their lives, enjoy the services of the government or company to which they have offered their personal information…
…until a tipping point is reached. That tipping point is different for everyone. But their may be a somewhat definable collective tipping point, or the right catalyst invoked for massive response: the type of thing that generates popular protests (like those we have seen in the past two weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and might be spreading to other dictatorial regimes in the Middle East).
I’m excited to see what Sara’s panel comes up with regard this question. The panelists are on both sides of the situation too. And of course this applies both literally and figuratively. If you’re online: companies (and of course the government) are always watching.
4 Comments to “When does free stop feeling like free online?”
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I think old-world Republican baby boomers, like many of us Gen Yers’ parents, have boiled over the tipping point, yet they don’t have the wherewithal or technological background to revolt. And Gen Y seems largely unconcerned.
Lots of good talking points in here. I thought the most interesting was, “a lot of people didn’t really feel the impact on their personal privacy.”
I think many people don’t even ponder the impact their actions have on their privacy because they don’t know that they are offering data. We generate data in everything we do– where we work, which way we drive to the grocery store, how frequently we read– it’s just that now we have a medium that is very good at capturing them. For someone getting into web services now, it’s a lot like walking into a store that has surveillance but no “smile, you’re on camera” signs posted. It’s creepy when you find out they were watching you the whole time.
For better or worse, I will be surprised if we don’t see federal action in a few years requiring more explicit/standard disclosure for more web sites.
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Is that “tipping point” inevitable? ‘Privacy’ is a relatively new concept, historically speaking. Those of us who are actually concerned about privacy to this extent are, as you point out, in the extreme minority. And while the proliferation of “free” services online represents an especially widespread data-mining operation even touching upon minors worldwide, companies have traded customers’ contact information for years before the internet without much push back (credit card companies in particular come to mind). Anytime Facebook (for instance) does anything that really seems to bug a significant number of people, the company kind of backs away slightly, only enough to quell complaint before it goes right back to doing what it always does. I think what we’ll see in the future will be companies getting better about being subtle about the collection and utilization of private data, rather than more respectful. I’d be very interested to read more on Sarah’s take and the discussion surrounding the panel at SXSW, though.