This past week brought us two tragic stories of young people that killed themselves because their privacy was invaded and made public on the Web using social tools. This caused USA Today to run a front-page article in whether social technologies are ultimately good or bad for us. As you know, this is a topic I have been speaking about quite a bit lately. Here is the link to the TEDx speech I did called “Did God Invent the Internet.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkpLfkUHNr0
Of course it is not just human beings that can be haunted online… There are a number of companies that are finding out that a few negative posts in the top page of a Google search can decimate a revenue stream. As people increasingly reach out to the Internet Crowd for input and research, your past and present behavior will have more of an impact on whatever you are trying to accomplish. Note that this does not always mean a negative outcome… There are also examples of positive comments being the trigger for new business or a new opportunity. The bottom line is that the world is becoming a lot more transparent and that is going to radically change certain aspects of our lives. It also must force us to evaluate the impacts of moving from a world where privacy is the norm, to a world where transparency is forced on us in some cases.
Up until this point, it has been pretty easy to present only the information we want someone to know about us, or our organizations. We valued privacy personally and corporately. The problem with this is the dichotomy that people with nothing to hide normally do not worry so much about privacy, and people with lots of things to hide crave privacy. Companies are the same of course – successful and well-run companies are glad to publish results and have audits. Companies that bend the rules want to control what anyone can see about them (e.g. Enron, Worldcom.) When audience members ask me what my feelings are about privacy and how much it is now invaded, I often think to myself that I am not concerned about it because I have nothing to hide. Outside of not wanting people to know when I am away from the house, I really don’t care if the public know anything else about me. Maybe I am just boring. Then I have to resist the urge to ask the questioner what it is they feel they need to hide? The truth for me is I am fine with transparency for myself, and every entity around me – it makes life easier to navigate because I don’t have to learn what was kept secret from me the hard way.
Regardless how you feel, transparency is going to be forced on us. Part of the reason for this is that privacy and lack of information about people, service providers, companies, and politicians has proven to be dangerous. In order to make informed decisions, we need data. The Internet gives us a very powerful tool to publish information publically, and for the crowd to memorialize our experiences with people, services and products and this forces providers/vendors/retailers to behave. The same holds true for people. We are becoming less willing to trust a prospective employee, a new person in our personal life, or a new potential business partner without first knowing much more about their background from the people they have come in contact with. And that does not mean checking on the few rigged references they have provided in the past.
But…. We cannot have people killing themselves because their private information is being published to 1.8 billion people on the Web. So where will the new line be drawn? What should be published so that we have transparency, and what should remain personal? If we leave it up to personal choice then we are back into a situation where the devious will simply hide in the weeds and try to be invisible online. The reality is we must create new social mores and boundaries for what goes online and what does not. This will be a process that no government can legislate so we the people better start figuring out what is acceptable because we are the only ones that can solve this riddle…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com