Is privacy the new currency on the internet?

With the advent of “social networks” over the last few years, privacy has become the “buzzword” surrounding them.  What do they do with the information we give them, how securely is it stored, how much do we need to provide in order to get what we want and is it a fair price?  There have been multiple instances of people asking these questions of companies like Facebook, MySpace, Google, Twitter, etc.  This in turn has coined phrases like “big data” to describe what is going on with all that information.

Now of course I’m involved in this “big data” as well, through my Google+ account, this blog, deviant Art and various other social networks dotted around the internet.  In most cases, I don’t pay a monetary fee to use these services (though in the effort of full disclosure I do pay an annual fee for my upgraded deviant Art account).  But just because I don’t pay cash, doesn’t mean I don’t pay in some way.  And that way is with my privacy.

In order to blog on Blogger for example, I need to have a Google account.  Now, I already had one, and I thought long and hard about using this platform over a couple of other well known blog sites.  In the end, I decided that Google already had the information about me through my Gmail account and my Google+ page.  So rather than trade my privacy (even if it’s only a few personal details) to another site, I’d use the one that already had them.  That’s a double edged sword of course.  It means that I can’t anonymously just blather on about a topic or say something inflamatory just for the sake of it, because my name is on this.  Of course, it also means that if I say something insightful, clever or amusing (or possibly all three at once) then people will know that I said it and not some nameless net denizen.

Now this got me thinking, about privacy and personal information in general but specifically how this information has become commoditised, and then down the track monetised by these services we use.  In essence, our privacy, our personal information that for so long was only known by friends and family, has become the currency we use to access services on the internet.  We barter this information about ourselves, about what we like, about where we go on the internet in order to “belong” to a social group.  And we all make decisions on this every time we post a comment, a picture, a status update, etc.

Recently, a new player came into what some might see as an already overcrowded market - App.net.  The big difference between App.net and Facebook was that you paid to join App.net.  There was no “free” offer.  You paid something like $50 per year and you got an ad free social network, where the idea was you could “network” from what I understand.  It was a bit of a surprise that someone would be so bold as to say “Sure, you join, it’s $50 a year” as opposed to “Sure, you join, we’ll just take your personal information, your browsing habits, any other information we can get hold of, distill it and then sell it on to marketing agencies to they can target their advertising at you”.  App.net have now changed their model slightly, there is still the $50 per year model but I believe they have now added a “free” account that has a limited set of features offered in the full one.   

Now in no way am I having a go at the companies that do that.  They are in this to make a buck and they’ve found a way to do it.  Sure, you might say it’s underhanded.  You could call it unethical.  You could rail against it as a perceived invasion of privacy, but in the end, each one of us who uses these services makes a decision on what we feel our privacy, our personal information is worth.  And then we use that as currency with the Facebook’s, Google’s and others to get access to the services we want to use.

Information is knowledge.  Knowledge is power.  In this virtual world we inhabit, the most powerful information is your own.  Know it’s value to you and to others so you can get the best deal you can by spending as little as possible.