The Cost Of Data Privacy
Greater transparency and better control of personal data by the consumer? It seems like a no-brainer that should have been a building block of these social media platforms from the get-go, unless that wasn’t the real purpose behind why they were built.
The notion that these companies who have made a lot of money out of the way that they have handled the data are going to suffer under new regulations that put them in the service of the consumer seem more than a little spurious. They are not even being told not to share the data any more — they just have to better regulate its distribution and better demonstrate their ability to track where it has been used. To assume that there will not be anything that is problematic occurring after these measures go into effect, or that these measures really do offer protection from exploitation of data is a little naive.
We are expecting institutions that have themselves obtained and exploited data that they would not have obtained were they playing by the rules. How do you frame a data breach? In what terms do you talk about it? Doesn’t that all depend on who is breaching the data? Doesn’t it all depend on whose data is being breached? Doesn’t the reasoning behind it have something to do with whether it is a legitimized or delegitimized action? Just look at the toothless inquiry committee that sat down ill-equipped to talk to Zuckerberg. Ill-equipped or undermotivated.
Money is the thing that puts one spin or the other on the game. But money really cannot buy integrity, and money cannot solve the problems that are being encountered unless there is some kind of fundamental shift in the viewpoint of the people creating these platforms.
If anything that you do is driven solely by the financial benefits that you are going to receive then there is something slightly out of whack in your thinking. When you have as your purpose the notion of helping, and using your company to do that, you will have no problem with your finances. You will work out a service that helps, or a product that helps. The help is the important thing.
Any companies that cannot turn their way of doing business around to be ethical and to satisfy the real needs of their users will not be able to continue on, and companies that promise and deliver these assurances will in the end replace them.
I think we have reached a point where the companies that have been around for a long time, and have made themselves seem integral to our lives are now having to take some responsibility for the roles they have assumed; and some of this is built from the idea that they have a certain amount of loyalty that they owe to the people who helped to make them as large as they are.
It doesn’t need to be the big scary thing that some people are talking about — it may indeed be an exciting place to be. How can the governments in question implement something designed to drive a change in ethics and not be impacted themselves?
