January 4, 2007

2007 Trends: Privacy Epiphany (Red Coat, Black Coat )

In the published article Red Coat, Black Coat I talked about a possible future where we’d have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don’t suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

Awareness will grow through media discussion but it will also grow as we watch how systems and brands react to us and our behavior. It seems to us that what has happened is that we’ve passed a watermark in terms of the amount of information we’re willing to divulge about ourselves to total strangers.

Bloggers, forum lurkers and MySpace page owners write about every aspect of their lives. It’s as if they’re performing at Raymond’s Revue bar blindfolded - only hearing the occasional cough or comment from the audience. Our openness is fueled by memes and quizzes that spin round the web. On the discussion forums on iVillage women divulge information about them that I bet their partners don’t know about and I was surprised about how many bloggers answered a ‘5 Things You Don’t Know About Me’ meme that went around that got them all to reveal some very personal information about them.

The USA Today has a very interesting article here about how people are scrambling to control the online information they’ve put out there:

"I do think it’s an invasion of privacy," says Melissa Bush, a business
major at the University of Dayton. "But when you think about it,
anything you post online is open season."

Is everyone aware of what other people do with that information?

I’ll be very open, at PSFK we mine information given on blogs and forums and provide it in trend reports to brands. We do this at a small level and, of course, we’re ‘only’ doing research and rarely come into contact the blogger - but it’s not hard to see how salesmen and spammers could turn all this information to their advantage: a financial adviser with access to all this personal info floating around would have a field day.

And that’s what’s going to happen. With our data on our blogs, on Linked In and the other social networks, we’re going to get social spam on a big scale. And that’s going to be one of the key drivers of the epiphany.

It’s not just what we write that we notice will be tracked - it will be our movement online and off. Every search engine is recording the your journeys through cyberspace, every site you give a password to collects data and monitors your behavior, even Google watches the trends in your RSS reading activity (at least they tell you here).

Offline we’re seeing the gradual introduction of RFID tags into things like boarding passes so, in this case, airports can monitor flow of passengers (and then optimize retail space). London is the most CC-TVed city in the world - they can almost track your every move! (For your own personal safety of course ;)

But don’t let that worry you too much. Keep an eye out for all your fellow citizens and their mobile phones - billions of the buggers walking around with the ability to photo or video you and then upload it straight to the web - or straight to the newsroom.

We would once call such things an "invasion of privacy" - but what we have written in this article is just the very tip of the iceberg. There is so much surveillance going on around us.

One day we’re going to be able to deal with this by wearing our ‘red coats’ but in 2007 we’re just going to realize how very naked we all are.

Article categories: Advertising & Branding, Creative Class, Global Community, Luxury, Opinion, Our Terms Not Yours, Privacy, Web & Technology