Online Privacy

Everyone is worried about their online privacy when they are on websites that are supposed to be secure or using phone services. But people are not aware of what type of impact the increased privacy has on other companies that make their money through advertising.

"If privacy regulations diminish how well web services can track your interests, then it's more difficult for them to pitch ads to you that match those interests. Advertisers are less willing to pay for ads that are less relevant to users. And that, of course, would mean less cash for the services. For example, Twitter is right now trying to figure out how to target its “promoted tweets” to the tweet streams of users who will care (a paid tweet from Oprah's Book Club probably isn't relevant to a 20-year-old male football fanatic). In order to do that, it might have to keep track of who you are. Some folks find such tracking creepy or risky, and would like to see it limited. What the EU experience shows us is what we might have to give up to have strict limitations on data collection. Facebook, Google Search and even sites like Techland are not really free services. You don't pay for them with money, but you do pay with a little bit of your privacy. If you limit the ability of users to pay with privacy, as the EU has done, then you might find that a service like Facebook will have to charge users something like $20 a month. More likely, it might never get built. Looking at innovation in the social web, what you see is that almost all of it comes from the U.S. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Google—they're all American companies. Where are all the European social web startups offering awesome free web services? It's likely that, at least in part, the less restrictive data collection rules in the U.S. explain this innovation gap.

Would you be willing to give up some privacy in order to have certain services free of change?