Why Privacy for Profit: Can you build trust through offering privacy?

A thought that has been simmering for a few days now, if consumers want privacy, that seems to imply they don’t have it today. If they don’t have privacy – in an age where those complaining live, fully clothed and made up, in gated communities, behind doors with locks, in rooms with doors, with their own bathroom – then what do they have? What is the NOT-privacy and how can organizations build trust through offering privacy?

So turning to language to understand the importance of privacy and it’s opposite in society – I asked the interwebs

Privacy
Synonyms: retirement, secrecy, solitude, seclusion, retreat, concealment, aloofness, sequestration, isolation, clandestineness, confidentiality
Antonyms: publicity, currency, notoriety, exposure, togetherness, publicity, publicness, sociableness

To me, the majority of the synonyms of privacy are ‘loner’ words, with a negative connotation. And the majority of the antonyms feel positive descriptions of a person in society. Does the idea of privacy have a place in digital society or is it an artificial construct that we falsely hark back to an earlier age?

Which led me to another interwebs diversion to understand what anthropologists make of this, which took me to Privacy from an Anthropological Perspectives by jaak van der Geest

“Anthropologists study people, practices, words, thoughts, objects, traditions, institutions, and so on in their context, while many other disciplines do the opposite. No spoken or written word has a fixed meaning but derives its meaning from the sentence or the wider context in which it occurs.”

Privacy from an Anthropological Perspectives

I thought this was important because privacy is now deeply embedded in the context of our digital lives.

Alan Westin (1970), an American law professor with a broad view on culture and society, discerns four types or aspects of privacy and four functions. The four aspects are solitude (being alone), intimacy (being alone with only one or a few close others), anonymity(being with others but unknown to them and unobserved, ‘lost in a crowd’), and reserve (being with others but having erected a ‘psychological barrier against unwanted intrusion’)

So maybe we don’t want all of privacy, but what we’d like is control over our anonymity and some reserve in our interactions with those who know us, but that we do not know.

The four functions or effects of privacy, mentioned by Westin, are personal autonomy (which includes self-identity and the ability to control communication and interaction with others); emotional release (the option of withdrawing and being free from observation by others); self-evaluation (the possibility of reflecting on one’s position vis-à-vis others); and protected communication (sharing confidential things with selected others).

Privacy from an Anthropological Perspectives

Our digital world is such that we leave digital footprints everywhere we go. In the physical world, we leave a trail but only forensic investigation will reveal that and the effort is too high. Digitally the cost of forensics is relatively low compared to the reward that the adtech industry has found. Maybe what we as members of digital society needs is Protected Communication

In the Longhouse, the families had social mechanisms that provided the privacy they wanted, such as rules about who could enter the house, restricted movements in the night, and working patterns that excluded other families.

A recurring finding is that Internet users are not helpless people that fall victim to the machinations of the Internet and lose grip on their pri-vate lives. Privacy is a process of optimal management of disclosure and withdrawal. Most users of Facebook were well aware of what they could share with whom and what not.

Privacy from an Anthropological Perspectives

So as Tony Fish says, digital natives have long figured out how they maintain privacy – e.g. teens with multiple Instagram accounts each permitting a different set of users allows them to compartmentalize their digital life.

Altman’s most important insight is that ‘privacy’ is not a more-or-less static condition but a dynamic process of having control over what one wants to share with selected others and what not.

The section on classic texts and traditional debates revealed the relative neglect of privacy by anthropologists.

The digital age we are living in poses an important new challenge for the anthropological study of privacy.

Finally, this chapter on privacy ethnography suggests surprising similarities between privacy in the present digital era and in the pre-digital Gemeinschaft-type community where nearly anyone was known to anyone. Where the baker was acquainted with the family and the character of the woman he employed in his shop and neighbours were aware of each other’s peculiarities. Where families knew the family of the boy with whom their daughter had fallen in love. Where the grocer knew what his client wanted to buy before she had spoken a word.

Privacy from an Anthropological Perspectives

Without accepting some intrusions of privacy society cannot exist.
So where does that leave us?  I quite liked that privacy is a dynamic process of having control over what one wants to share with selected others and what not.

The anthropological diversion provides us with a good intersection between agency over personal data and societal privacy – they could be one and the same. Not that we didn’t already know that, but I like that it’s validated here.

So the NOT PRIVACY is a condition that we have today as we consume the web’s free and possibly paid-for treasures. The interesting thing is that there is no accepted term for NOT privacy. (¬PRIVACY).

However, taking the idea of protected communication and having control over what one wants to share, we could turn to the word ‘trust‘. Our online privacy is in the hands of those organizations with whom we deal with each digital day. If we are able to trust those organizations, the nature of our relationship with them will be of greater mutual value. Bernardo Crespo’s Zero Moment of Trust puts this into context.

What can an organization do to build trusted and long term relationships with its customers? I suggest there are four pillars: 

1. Offer real value in products or services – otherwise customers will not return
2. Make a financial return – otherwise the organization will not be able to sustain the relationship
3. Respond to the customer when they make a request – silence or evasion will strain that relationship
4. Give the customer control over what they want to share with whom – meaning that organizations must build trust through offering privacy

Organizations not providing the fourth pillar, for instance by using traditional adtech marketing, are increasingly at risk. Not because of regulatory compliance, but because they will fail to rise above the noise of evermore intrusive marketing. And now the question remains, How can organizations build trust through offering privacy

This, I believe leads us to the notion of ‘Zero Party Data‘, where all data exchanged (in all directions) is highly consented (pillar 4) to explicitly enable real value creation, a financial return and responsiveness to the customer (pillars 1,2 and 3). Which is the origination of the name Privacy for Profit.