The Pew Research Center this morning released the last of seven studies on where digital life is headed in the next decade — this one focused on privacy concerns.
A survey of experts revealed split opinion on whether there will be a trusted privacy-rights infrastructure in place by 2025. But there was strong consensus on both sides that for right now people accept a degree of tracking as a fair trade for getting services, typically for free, that they value and use daily.
What’s the implication for media, with many outlets betting the franchise these days that they can develop higher priced advertising as they harvest data on what you prefer and perhaps where you are?
That is not addressed directly in the report, Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of Pew’s Internet research and co-author of the study with Janna Anderson of Elon University, told me in a phone interview. But the implications are clear.
“The Internet of things,” will up the ante on privacy, Rainie said. The mobile era is rapidly generating more and more data on where we are, and where we have been. Soon, “your car knows when you are in it; your house knows you walked into the room.. In effect, our devices are tattling on us.” .
People have general worries about how broadly this data is collected, analyzed and sold for commercial purposes or accessed by government, he said, but getting targeted advertising messages “is not what’s most worrying them.”
Conversely “new sensitivities in the mobile environment” are on the upswing. If norms develop on what’s all right, what’s out of bounds and what needs to be disclosed, media outlets will be swept along and need to comply, in Rainie’s view.
One specific change in the offing, he added, may be in what he called “media flow.” We are getting accustomed to being served the right news stories for our personal interests, but for now “people launch the engagement.” Will they welcome or resent a next step — a sort of news alert system on steroids — where a service or algorithm tells them news they need to look at now?
Already that issue is popping up as Facebook and Google tweak their news recommendations systems and some users find the methodology less transparent than it ought to be,
The survey makes for good scanning. I found particularly of note comment from two Google execs. Chief economist Hal Varian summed up privacy prospects this way:
There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Widespread sensors, databases, and computational power will result in less privacy in today’s sense but will also result in less harm due to the establishment of social norms and regulations about how to deal with privacy issues. By 2025, the current debate about privacy will seem quaint and old-fashioned. The benefits of cloud-based, personal, digital assistants will be so overwhelming that putting restrictions on these services will be out of the question. Of course, there will be people who choose not to use such services, but they will be a small minority. Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored,since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great.”
