Just a few days after Tim Oren was formulating his own Hierarchy of Unease, I sent the following to some of the folks involved with AttentionTrust:
We should clarify just what we mean by "privacy" in this context, because I think the traditional privacy debate is in the process of being turned on its head.
I think "privacy" has generally meant restricting access to personal information in order to 1) prevent identify theft and other information-based crimes, 2) stop spam and other intrusive commercial appeals, and 3) maintain an abstract sense of individual dignity through discretion.
But, taking those issues in reverse order:
- Social norms about discretion, about what is or should be private are in the process of changing dramatically. People not only want to share personal information about themselves, they want to celebrate it. Seth [Goldstein] alludes to this in his quote from Goldhaber in yesterday's post: "The new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don't normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now..."
- Similarly, there is an increased tolerance for commercial appeals when there is a perceived exchange in value. Ads are now expected to be entertaining in and of themselves, or to accompany some free service that makes them tolerable. A fundamental issue that AttentionTrust is calling attention to is that people are undervaluing their attention, perhaps significantly. In this context..."privacy" means the ability to set a price on your attention (high or low), and to make informed choices about the attention transactions you enter into.
- I'm not sure what to say about identity theft, which consumes more of my personal attention than is probably healthy, other than to note that famous people, i.e. people who capture a great deal of attention, are rarely victims. At some point in the future, protecting our "privacy" may not be about locking our information away, but about having so much unique information publicly available that it will be impossible for anyone to impersonate you. Foolish, perhaps, but a thought.
