‘Privacy’ is Tech’s Newest Marketing Strategy and That’s a Good Thing!
Why Sillicon Valley’s latest privacy strategy can lead us all to a better future?
Writing in the Washington Post, Andrea Peterson has said that “it seems that mainstream tech companies are starting to compete for consumers based on technical privacy upgrades in a way almost unimaginable in a world before Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency spying”. Actually this is not only a marketing gimmick, it’s also the rebranding of the tech companies which will help them to restore the confidence of customers around the world.
Recently, CEOs of the nine largest tech titans including Apple, Google and Facebook wrote a joint letter to US Senators in which they said, “Confidence in the Internet, both in the U.S. and internationally, has been badly damaged over the last year”. This damage has affected business in the US, recently the New York Times reported:
Ben Young, the general counsel for Peer 1, a web hosting company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, said his customers were keeping their business out of the United States because the country “has a serious branding problem.”
In other big news — which might help us to understand why the tech companies have become suddenly conscious about privacy — iPhone 6 got clearance only after convincing the Chinese government that iPhones don’t have any security “backdoors”. So the latest effort is mostly about survival.
While many ordinary people are concerned with surveillance, it is really hard for them to find alternatives or to do the privacy related stuff by themselves. So it is for the best that tech companies do this for their customers. So users are getting more privacy by just choosing the right company!
Due to the tech companies latest efforts we will have better security. As Peterson mentioned in her piece, “backdoor access or lawful intercept technology introduces insecurity into the larger ecosystem”. So removing “backdoors” will create a more secure internet. From a 2014 EFF report, “we saw major improvements in industry standards for informing users about government data requests, publishing transparency reports, and fighting for the user in Congress.” (Emphasis mine)
So while tech companies are working to regain customers’ trust — we users can hope for better ecosystems, better products and above all, better internet.
