Vol. 2, Issue 3: This Is A Private Conversation
Remember when you were a kid - let’s say a teenager - and the phone would ring in your house.* The phone would ring and it was for you - one of your friends was calling to tell you a story about something that happened that day or about some crush that you had or that someone said something stupid and how ridiculous are they are. One of your parents picked up the phone and then they screamed “[INSERT YOUR NAME HERE], it’s for you!” and if you weren’t lucky enough to have a phone in your room, you’d come to the phone (or one of the other ones in the house) and say (or scream) “I’ve got it!”.
*Bear with me here: there was a time where a lot of houses only had phones in the common areas of the house and those phones had cords, so you could only stray so far from them, which is so laughably foreign now that I’m not even sure this analogy or story is going to work, but again, bear with me
But inevitably, either the person who picked up the phone would either hang around the area to listen to your side or, if you were on a different phone, stay on the line to try to listen to the whole conversation. This wasn’t necessarily a function of them being nosy; it’s just what people did. Do you remember what you’d say?
“Hey, can I have a little PRIVACY?”
Privacy.
Back then, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, right? When you closed the door of your bedroom, you expected some privacy. When you were on the landline telephone (to use the retronym we all use now), you expected some privacy. When you went about your day, you expected some privacy. I mean, sure, when you were in a restaurant or something, there was nothing stopping anyone from eavesdropping on your conversation - and some types of people tried really hard to do that (which is where the trope of putting a glass up against a door to listen to try to hear what people were saying comes from), but generally speaking, there was a passive agreement about some level of privacy.
I’m not even sure what question to ask about how we got from that to where we are today.
There’s a few competing thoughts here:
Every poll that I’ve seen seems to indicate that people both want data privacy online and don’t understand or trust how their data is being handled online. Again, that’s data. Frankly, they’re probably not wrong about the latter. I think the former is an opinion and one that each person should take a minute to figure out what privacy means to them and what they’re willing to give to optimize the experience that they have online (both as it pertains to advertising and or recommendation engines
But contrast that with how people actually behave online. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around someone who says “please respect my privacy” and then goes and posts everything that they did that weekend with everyone that they did it with (including their family and friends who potentially have no interest in being a bit character in the social media movie of the person’s life) and every location at which they did it without any blocks at all. I mean, if I wanted to burglarize the homes of these people*, it feels like it would be pretty easy to do that.
*I don’t
I often sit and think about how those two competing things actually play out in people’s minds. And ultimately where I land is that I think people want control and they’re using the word “privacy” because that’s what they think gives them control.
This isn’t a judgement in any meaningful way. It is what it is.
Because the reality is that people are willing to trade some of their data and information for a pretty low value exchange. I don’t know about you, but I’ve traded my email for 20% off of a t-shirt more times than I care to admit*. And that email is used for a variety of things and depending on their terms of service, packaged up and segmented and potentially licensed to other people to deliver me some sort of relevant advertising.
The very nature of how all of this happens in the Chrome browser is going to undergo a significant change next year when they deprecate the 3rd party cookie. When I was on stage at Programmatic I/O last week, I had the opportunity to discuss in some high level detail how OpenX is approaching testing the Privacy Sandbox initiative with Google and how I believe publishers should think through their strategy and begin to think through how they’re going to approach this in 9-12 months, because none of this work happens overnight.
*The value exchange for those t-shirt vendors is that they’ll send me 2 emails a day for the rest of my life
A data-less internet would not be fun, in the same way that a data oversubscribed internet isn’t exactly fun either. I haven’t been on Facebook in years, but when I used get targeted ads that said something like “Are you a 35-year old Binghamton graduate looking for a dentist? Look no further!”, that’s a creep factor of like 12*. If I had to put it into words, there’s an uncanny valley curve for advertising on the internet that we haven’t exactly found the nadir of. What’s the right balance between what you’re willing to give and the amount of control you’re going to dial up?
*On a scale of 1-10, obvi
I don’t have the answers to these questions for you. I’m not even sure I have them for myself. But I think about them a lot.
It’s Banned Books Week. I’m not here to tell you what to believe, what you should read, what you should teach your kids or anything like that. That’s all up to you. I am here to tell you that reading books is the foundation of a life of intellectual curiosity and the ability to think critically - two things that have helped me bigly as I’ve gone about doing what I do. And that the only thing that’s good about banning books is that it almost always has the opposite of the intended effect: these books get read more.
What kind of a world do you want to live in? A Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 world? Or a world where a universe of possibilities is open to you? It’s an easy call.
If you’re inclined and have a few pennies to spare, donate something to your local library. You’ll feel like a million bucks.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time, friends