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.
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By putting our private self out there, maybe we are all hoping for acceptance and intimacy. Perhaps we cant help our Ego wanting to Look Good whilst our Self is really out to Be Loved.
Its this nakedness that may begin to foster a new humanity. Afterall when people can see that we are all concerned with similar issues, share similar passions and values it serves to bring people closer together. At the same time, it also opens up the discussion for what makes us different, separates us and generates new possibilities for discussion.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Maybe this will get a few people more ‘aware’:
US to store Brits fingerprints
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2007010068,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=TheSun:News
January 8th, 2007 at 12:11 am
The Onion’s story on Privacy Epiphany: Amazon suggestions understands woman more than husband.
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/01/the_filter_who__1.html
January 11th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Interesting piece, Piers. And I also love your comment, Eva.
I completely agree with you, Piers, that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying.
However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) “red coat, black coat” analogy, but don’t spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor’s New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the “naked identity” of the wearer.
Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?
We can never really be sure what’s what or who’s who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:
We can never really be sure what’s what or who’s who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job – you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I’d bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you’ll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Piers,
Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.
Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.
Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friend’s opinions of other friends and so on.
May 21st, 2007 at 3:14 am