I had never heard of Rapleaf until reading that WSJ article,
and I am little bit weirded out. I am not that surprised really, and I actually
would have been more surprised if a company like that didn’t exist. Personally,
I don’t really like the idea that I am being tracked in any way and I would
really like to live my life more anonymously, and I do think that is my right.
However, in a more general sense, I don’t really see what the big deal is about
data collection given all the value that we get from it. Business school has
certainly made me more acutely aware of what data is actually being collected
and what it is being used for, but I don’t think it has really changed my
attitudes about privacy issues.
What business school has changed is my attitude about
marketing. This sounds completely absurd, but marketing is beautiful.
Obviously, different people have slightly different definitions of what
marketing is, but my high-level definition is finding out what groups of people
are interested in your product, finding out how you can tweak the product for
your customers’ maximum benefit, and figure out the best way to get it to them.
Everybody wins. And what better way to find out what people want than mounds
and mounds of data?
One thing I don’t think the articles did a very good job of
was highlighting the benefits of all this data that is being collected. The
real-time traffic information that Google provides was mentioned, and that is a
notable one. Product improvement and fraud detection are others, and the list
continues. In class we were talking about the issues with digital medical records;
there are obviously many thorny privacy issues there, but imagine the good that
could come out of having all records digitized. There would probably be better
outcomes for each patient on an individual basis, but if we had a single
database with millions of medical treatments and outcomes the science of
medicine could grow by leaps and bounds, which would benefit the entire world. Beyond
that, services like social media can only be free if they can monetize
something, and data will likely continue to be that something.
Targeted advertising is one area that people (including myself)
find creepy. The WSJ article mentions how Rapleaf has been used in political campaigns
to target swing voters, which at first seemed inappropriate to me. But upon
reflection, it seems stupid to do it any other way. Why should anyone other
than an undecided voter have to be bothered with an election ad? And why should
a campaign waste resources on somebody that has made up their mind? (The caveat
here is that those ads need to be truthful, which is a big ‘if’.) But move that
situation out of the political realm and into the realm of business and it
seems much more appropriate. I don’t want to see ads for Polydent or lingerie,
but I wouldn’t mind knowing what the best deals for laptops targeted at
business school students are. It is just efficiency.
The big question then becomes, are there real privacy
concerns or are we just creeped out? By and large, I think we are just creeped
out. Yes, there are some horrible things that could happen if data got into the
wrong hands. Aside from clearly illegal things like identity theft, concerns
that insurance companies would deny coverage based on ostensibly private data
and similar sorts of discrimination are real concerns. But up until this point,
we have benefited tremendously from all the data collection going and I am not
aware of any truly systemic problems it has caused. Lots of concerns, but no
real problems.
So what should we do about privacy in the future? I have
absolutely no idea. My gut tells me privacy is very important and should be
protected, but intellectually it seems to me like the benefits far outweigh the
risks. Government regulation is certainly not the answer. Some broad consumer
protections make sense, but this issue is moving way too fast for government to
intervene in a beneficial manner. I sure would like a switch on my devices that
allowed me to be anonymous, but I think that it is only fair that companies
that offer free services would not be obligated to serve a device in ‘anonymous’
mode. That certainly might be part of a solution.
Ultimately, we are getting much less concerned with privacy
and I think that could really be a good thing. Everybody loves to say how great
transparency is; well, it is time to walk the walk. We are rapidly moving
towards extremely transparent lives. In order to be truly transparent you have
to have self-confidence and behave in an ethical manner and neither one of
those are bad things. And when your entire life is out in the open for everyone
to see, you are probably going to be much more forgiving of other peoples
mistakes lest you be judged by them. It is a little pie in the sky to suggest
that losing our privacy will make the world a better place, but I don’t think
it is completely insane either.
