Is "privacy" real?
In the early days of the United States, you had a choice. You could live in the same town all your life, and everything about you was known by your neighbors, or you could wander from town to town, making you anonymous to everyone you met.
"Privacy" was an irrelevant concept. You were entitled to draw your curtains against peeping toms, or latch the door of your outhouse, but otherwise if you participated in town life, your life was like the the movie "The Truman Show," where everyone could watch your daily life. Unless you absented yourself from the town, in which case you forfeited connection in favor of invisibility. Your choices were belonging and exposure -- or separation and evaporation. Everyone knew everything about you, or nothing.
During the Industrial Age, that changed. People began to think they could live with partial visibility. OK for you to see how I maintain my lawn, or to note my license plate, but not to know my bank balances or what movies I rent.
Now we see another change. Technology takes us back to an era where anything you do and say can be circulated widely and immediately. A vice-presidential candidate's email enters the public domain. A basketball player who quietly disses the national anthem is caught on a cell phone camera. College instructors are publicly evaluated in RateMyProfessor.com. The implication for business is apparent: If you mistreat one customer, even inadvertently, then it's likely that thousands and maybe millions will soon hear about it and you can never "ungoogle" yourself. Your best hedge against unwanted exposure? Treating customers fairly and with respect -- in other words, building a reputation for trustworthiness. It's the best way to balance the current value of customers with being able to count on their business and their kind words in the future.
Do you have a story about a company who has built -- or violated -- your trust? Share it with us here.
Related Entries
If you really want to know the truth about consumer privacy issues and what is occurring in today's corporate secrets than you must read "Consumer Privacy: An Invasion of (Corporate) Locust" by author Darlene R. Miles. This author has spent the last 23 years developing consumer systems for corporations and has documented the truth. The truth about banking and banking transactions, the courts, insurance, financing strategies that have resulted in today’s mortgage crisis, in background information gathering from the internet to your home telephone number, and the invasion into consumer medical information and their use in consumer financing - to telephony systems and so much more. What makes this authors book so riveting is that she tells consumers how to effectively block access to their personal, medical and financial information including credit…yes credit.
Hello Martha
Would like to suggest a book for your readers, The Numerati by Stephen Baker
The best description of the issue is contained in this quote from the book
“As this world takes shape, we’ll have to figure out how much of ourselves to hide. Decades ago, I’m told, my sister in law grappled with this question. She was stepping out of the shower in the bathroom of her all-women’s dorm, and she heard a call “Men on the floor!” At many schools, this would have been a non-event, but she was in a highly conservative religious college. She was naked. She only had a small towel to cover herself, and there were men prowling the hallways. She could hear them. She waited, but they didn’t go away. So she began to think about which part of her body to cover with the towel. It barely fit across her bottom or her top. It certainly didn’t cover both. She had to make a choice. Finally she had an inspired idea. She threw the towel over her head – and then scampered naked to her room. Given the options, it was more important for her to cloak her identity than her body.
In this new world, all of us are going to face situations in which our most intimate data is exposed, at least to somebody.” Pg 203
Cheers
Miro