” The overwhelming majority of web practicioners have no training, education, or guidance in online privacy.
Check your privacy privilege by Heather Burns on Webdevlaw
Other professionals assume web development is an organised profession with a defined career path like theirs. It is very, very difficult for highly intelligent people working in law and academia, for whom their careers meant three or four years at university, a year or two at graduate school, a full-time position in a professionally structured company, and a clear path of career development, to understand that web development has none of that. They assume we learned certain things, in certain places, at certain times. They assume we receive certain things in the workplace. (They assume we have a workplace). They assume we receive refreshers, CPD, or ongoing training. They assume we are fed regular knowledge by a professional body. To professionals like those, the reality of being a web development practicioner, with no training, guidance, or support, is incomprehensible.“
Privacy is (was) an ephemeral concept that came with the industrial revolution and departed with the digital revolution. When will lived in villages and the idea of our own room in a house didn’t exist – the only privacy we had was in our own minds. Now that everything thing we say or do gives off data as product or by-product we once again have no privacy.
The web is made of software – and although the people who make that software are termed engineers, unlike the engineers who build bridges, they are not necessarily qualified or regulated in any way. Which means that the digital world they have created was not designed for any of society’s purposes. It has been designed primarily for for profit entities- and therefore things like privacy and equity have not been the prime objective. We are now discovering the cost to society of just allowing them to evolve.
Seeing the personal data movements (me2b, vrm, mydata) still struggling for mainstream adoption because neither people nor business actually cares enough (benefits of adopting privacy tech < cost) l, makes me think something is fundamentally flawed. The average consumer will not create themselves a personal data store. They will continue to click the crafty consent notices. They will keep downloading and using dangerous apps like TikTok. So no matter what the commissioned surveys say, people’s behavior says they don’t care about their data.
However, the marketers do care because that data is the key to accessing intent to purchase, and even better, the key to creating demand. Instead of mining data to see what I want, mine data and tell me what I want. Influence all of my sensory inputs and provide all the social cues that make me yearn for what they are selling.
Now advertisers are boycotting Facebook, Facebook will shift policy on hate speech and misinformation where it has to in order to regain the advertising revenues. Facebook will change because it’s customers demand it. But those same customers are still hungry for our data. And remember Unilever is the client, Facebook is the business, and we the people are the product. So ultimately neither Facebook nor Unilever are incentivized to change the model on privacy and personal data.