The Privacy Tradeoff

This past week Facebook and Google either made changes or announced they were going to be making changes with how they use your information.

It has some folks up in arms.  I’ve seen posts on Facebook pages asking people to untag them from photos and stuff.  It’s a form letter and it’s silly.

Here’s why:

In 2013 the idea of having privacy is unrealistic.

We have already willingly given away more information than we realize.

Use a credit card or debit card?

How about a store loyalty card?

Own a cellphone?

Do you have a GM car with the OnStar system?

Do you use a free email account such as Yahoo, Hotmail,or Gmail?

Do you have a drivers licence?

Do you own a car?

I could go on and on and on.

You have been giving away tidbits of information about yourself and your habits for years.

And cameras are everywhere.  Security cameras, traffic cameras, even Google with street view may have snapped a picture of you or your home.

News that the government has access to our info was disturbing to many earlier this year, but let’s take a moment and see what the trade off is all about.

Security is obvious.  The presence of cameras in retail stores should actually make us feel a bit safer. It’s a lot easier to track down criminals if we have a recording of the crime.

Less obvious is the GPS tracking in our cellphones.  But what if a family member is missing.  The ability of law enforcement being able to locate them is something that just wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

How about email and social media targeting ads based on what they know about us?  As a 50 year old guy, I appreciate not seeing ads for tampons or acne products.  The weeks that I was researching smartphones, I noticed LOTS of ads geared towards cell phone plans while I was surfing the web. If there was only a way to get them to stop now that I’m done shopping, but they will decrease as I search for other things.

And here’s the real trade off…

The web is basically free.

Google doesn’t charge you,  Facebook doesn’t charge you, No one is charging you to use the web. 

The only thing we pay for is a connection to the web and a device to access the web.  I’m talking about your phone, a tablet, laptop or desktop computer and perhaps internet service piped into our home and businesses.  That’s different.

Even though the web is free for us, the consumers of the web, it still costs money.  It costs money to buy and maintain the equipment that powers the website and for the electricity to power that equipment.  It costs money to pay the people who run the sites. The web is not a volunteer project.  it costs money.

The most commonly accepted system of paying these expenses is capitalism based mostly with advertising and sometimes supplemented with subscriptions.

This is the privacy tradeoff.

You and I get to use Facebook and Google and they get to serve us with ads based on the data they gather about us.

They are now increasing their reach into our lives by taking our “Likes” and using them as part of the advertising campaigns to others.

Now I used to really dislike Facebook because they kept changing their privacy settings and I was worried too.

But I have nothing to hide.  And most of you don’t either.

You really have nothing to fear.   So relax.  You will never have complete privacy, but for most of us, the tradeoff is worth it.