Big data is a big deal and Americans are of two minds about it. In this case, though, the division of attitudes doesn’t break along the expected good/bad line. Instead, American attitudes about it break along a line of “it’s bad when government does it, but okay when business does it.” The NSA learned this lesson when, after the Snowden leaks, it got organizational whiplash from the public outcry against its phone metadata gathering program. The responses to business big data initiatives, on the other hand, range from desultory “whatever” attitudes to enthusiasm.
A case in point is Dan Shure’s review of Yesware that appeared on Evolving SEO. Yesware is an application that theoretically tracks whether recipients open the emails you send. Setting aside the technical hurdles, the comments on the article are revealing.
Positive comments refer to it as a “great tool,” or “useful,” or “off the hook.” The negative comments, however, include numerous references to the NSA, such “This is only a good idea if you want the NSA reading all your private business emails,” and “What a propaganda piece for the NSA,” or “Does this app hook up directly the Obama admin, NSA, and FBI?”
When Microsoft announced its intention to include “always on” microphones and cameras with the Xbox One, effectively allowing Microsoft to monitor the behavior of millions of people in their homes, at any time, there was minimal public outcry. While some gamers and publications expressed privacy concerns, the public largely took it as one of those things that businesses do and moved on. If our problem is with being spied on and having our privacy violated, where was the outrage?
These reactions reflect the schizophrenic public response to how businesses and government acquire and use big data. If it is just getting used to sell more products, that’s okay. If government is collecting information, it gets read as an unforgiveable invasion of privacy. But is this response to business data collection rational?
The scope of data available, from your public comments on Facebook and Twitter to in-app purchases on your phone and your behavior on a company website, allows businesses to create detailed customer profiles. The profiles might not target a specific person, but they target a specific type of person. As businesses refine those profiles by GPS coordinates acquired from phones, the organizations you admit to belonging to and even the kind of mobile devices you use, the distance between the generic profile and living, breathing individual becomes ever smaller. In essence, big data lets businesses predict behaviors, preferences and lifestyle choices to a degree of accuracy impossible even 20 years ago.
With such advanced profiling available and the scope of privacy shrinking, consumers might rightly worry that businesses will use the insights gleaned from big data to cross the line from persuasion into outright manipulation. Of less concern, seemingly, is that the current laws governing advertising and marketing cannot prevent unethical marketing strategies built to abusively manipulate members of hyper-specific, consumer profiles. Nor do we have any reason to believe that businesses won’t tie our specific data, such as answer to “anonymous” surveys, to individual files on us. The only assurance we have is their promise that the information is only used in aggregate data. The truth is that businesses are on their honor to deal with big data ethically.
In the absence of clear legal protections, the apparent laissez faire attitude adopted by many people about privacy in relation to businesses seems naïve. It places implicit trust in global corporations that pursue profit relentlessly. Yet, the same people, me included, react almost violently to the idea of government gathering the exact same kind of data. What drives this cultural schizophrenia?
Government is often perceived in monolithic terms. It isn’t viewed as thousands of discrete moving parts, but as a single organism that shares collective blame for the failure of any of its parts. The sins of the FBI under Hoover, the widely held belief that the Warren Commission covered up the truth about JFK’s assassination, the exposure of Nixon’s lies, the Iran Contra Scandal, the Clinton impeachment, the Valerie Plume scandal and the Snowden leaks all pile up to create a perception of government as untrustworthy and corrupt, and individual players in government as self-interested and vengeful.
Even though the business community probably bears responsibility for more scandals, cover-ups and malfeasance than the government, the public sees business as a fragmented landscape. After all, Bank of America might have illegally foreclosed on thousands of people, but that doesn’t say anything about how my bank treats its customers. While Exxon let millions of gallons of crude oil pollute Prince William Sound, that doesn’t make the gas station down the road evil. The idea of providing businesses access to personal data doesn’t seem as dangerous because most businesses appear to act in good faith.
Americans are complacent about business in a way that they aren’t about government. There is a reflexive distrust government and its intentions, for reasons that may be valid or not, but it wasn’t always that way. For the first half of the 20th century, Americans assumed government acted honorably and in their best interests. Government, with all of its Constitutional constraints, so utterly failed to live up to the public’s faith that it now gets automatic distrust. Why do we expect profoundly less constrained businesses to do any better?
This article provides a good point and raises a question where does lie the boundary between legitimate security measures and violation of privacy? It’s no wonder that society becomes schizophrenic with such conditions.