At
the Verisign Distinguished Speaker, Vint
Cerf, one of the founders of internet technology, told us that
privacy is impossible on the internet. It is a huge copy machine with
multiple copies of everything ingested, and a quest for increasingly
more information.
There
is a strange paradox about privacy.
One
the one hand, there are things we do not share with even the closest
of friends and certainly do not choose to have the information
available via the internet.
On
the other hand, we cheerfully click away our privacy (and sometimes
ownership) by agreeing to the terms
of service, volunteer information on-line forms (why does a
utility app want to know our family income?), and rush to tag
pictures of friends as well as publicly share information about
ourselves and others.
Others
ignore the tenets of privacy - a friend told me about a local TV
personality and film crew greeting him as he entered a store: “
come on in and shop while we film you”. He turned on his heel
leaving the store and the intrusive video team.
On my
social security card there it says DO NOT
use for identification – however, many states and localities, as
well as the Federal government, require the social security number as
an identifier – even used it as a driver license number.
Privacy
is a complicated issue with conflicting demands by the individual and
others to protect or disclose information. In addition, violating an
individual's privacy is an emotional issue.
Recall
the firestorm caused by Instagram/Facebook
changing the terms of service (TOS) to claim ownership of everything
posted on their site and the ability to use the information in any
public way they chose. The TOS were revised in a couple of days as a
result of the public response.
Give
out your name, social security number, and mother's maiden name and
you may be sharing your identity with a thief.
As
leaders we do not want our organization to be on the wrong side of a
privacy issue – best to keep in mind that if we don't collect it,
there's no possibility of accident or larceny where we'd lose it.
Choose carefully what private information you collect on people; if
something goes south, expect the response will be magnified by an
emotional reaction.
How
do you address the privacy paradox?
