privacy

When it comes to managing the digital customer experience, there’s an interesting duality all of us need to deal with:

When it comes to managing the digital customer experience, there’s an interesting duality all of us need to deal with:

Earlier this week, Anil Dash wrote a smart piece unpacking the concept of “public.” He opens with some provocative questions about how we imagine the public, highlighting how new technologies that make heightened visibility possible. For example,

While there are certainly things that have changed since I first wrote this piece in 2001, there's a lot of underlying issues that I think still hold true. People want value from their data. Value for them. When companies do that, both the consumer and the company wins.

If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. Most people know this. The basis of the business model is that your personal data is mined and shared with all kinds of companies that can use this data for their benefit. Mostly this data is used to sell advertising space or intelligence to improve advertising efficiency.

Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.” As a researcher who’s been in the trenches on these topics for a long time now, none of their finding surprised me but it still gives me absolute delight when our data is so beautifully in synch. I want to quickly discuss two important issues that this report raise.

After just a few days in the job, the UK’s first youth crime commissioner, Paris Brown, resigned over some of her past Twitter postings. There are no doubt many posts that she wishes could be deleted, forgotten forever, and she is not alone.

In a radio interview last week, controversial New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg all but conceded that unmanned NYPD spy drones would one day be flying overhead in Manhattan.

December is often a time for predictions, and the most consistent predictions for social media in 2013 concern data. Whether it’s called big data or social media data, brands are expected to make more use of the opportunities this data holds in the coming year.

The concept of privacy is undergoing a radical transformation, thanks to our continuing willingness to provide companies like Facebook and Google our data for free. If, before, we largely lived our lives in private, we now live our lives in public. In many cases, we no longer even know what is public and what is private, who has our information, and what they are doing with it.