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The Costs and Benefits of Anytime, Anywhere
I am going to cite two Matts in this post.
First Matt Richtel in a front page story in today's New York Times starts out with,
Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset.
It it true that the carriers, and increasingly software products you install on your cellphone that are carrier independent, can tell you and others exactly where you are.
While this may be problematic in certain privacy respects, it is hugely beneficial in most respects. Do you want to know where your teenage daughter is at 11pm after she fails to call you as she promised? Do you want to know where the nearest Starbucks or Jamba Juice or subway stop is? Would you like to be able to text message your buddies the exact location of the cool bar you are hanging out in? I think you get the picture.
This leads me to my second Matt, Matt Blumberg, who wrote a post called The New Media Deal in the spring of 2004 which remains in my mind one of the most important posts I have read in blogs in the past couple years.
In this post, Matt describes the new deal consumers are making via technology. We are consciously or subconsciously sacrificing absolute privacy in return for anywhere, anytime, my way content and communication.
As Matt says in his post,
But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that we have a New Media Deal, which is that people are willing to sacrifice their anonymity in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there.
So we can wring our hands all we want about the privacy issues with respect to geolocation on cell phones, or behavioral targeting on the web, or saved search history on Google, but my feeling is that the benefits of these technologies will vastly outweigh the loss of privacy for most people most of the time and that's really all that matters.
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Posted December 10, 2005 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
One of the best ideas I've heard with tracking cell phone signals is the ability to determine real-time traffic speeds. And there are tons of others, some of which were mentioned in the post. I know I am definitely willing to let the government, or anyone else, know where I am if they could tell me how to avoid the traffic on the GWB.
All the paranoia around the issue reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Bart gets put on medication that makes him paranoid and he thinks that Major League Baseball is spying on people through the use of their satellites...
Posted by: Jarid | Dec 10, 2005 9:30:46 AM
Yeah, it's really great until you get whisked away for stating your beliefs or working for justice, or anything that upsets the status quo. (As an aside--I encourage everyone to watch Syriana).
Activists around the world are already harassed, arrested, investigated, jailed, and murdered for working for justice. The Patriot Act enables the indcredibly trustworthy US government to pretty much do the same. It's not the service providers that are so bothersome, it's the same Big Brother that supports extra-judicial killings, abduction, torture, Argentinian-like "disappearances", etc.
But hey, at least we'll know when we're near a Starbucks. I'm with Bart.
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Dec 10, 2005 10:24:02 AM
It's interesting. I was recently asked by a friend whether i would be willing to insert a chip inside my daughter's skin so that i could always know where she is. At first i was like, no way! Then the safety issues came to mind and i struggled to answer it. I find it very compelling to think that that kind of comfort (or at least close to it) can be secured via a cell phone. She's only 1 years old, but i think i'll be getting her a phone for Hanukah :)
Posted by: eric goldstein | Dec 10, 2005 3:51:04 PM
Well I think your daughters wherabouts are a thing worth sacrificing so that I cannot be traced or measured. I'm cool with it being an opt in service.
I wonder though.... Do you also want to be notified if your teenage daughter has an abortion? How much parental control are you interested in?
Posted by: bret branon | Dec 11, 2005 5:28:58 AM
At a Blogon panel where I sat, the man from AOL said that young people have a very different compact about privacy than their parents (us). They hand over all kinds of personal information because they get back what they want. I also say the internet is not a medium of content but of connections and you can't connect unless you reveal yourself to some extent.
There are overused buzzwords in this era. There are also overused fright words. "Privacy" has been overused as a fright word.
The primary issue here is going to be legal: Who owns your location data (the parallel question AttentionTrust asks: Who owns your attention data?)? And what does it take for government or opponents in suits and divorces and such to obtain that data? Perhaps we need stronger rights over that data so we can get the greater benefits of revealing it.
Posted by: Jeff Jarvis | Dec 11, 2005 7:30:54 AM
You know, some years ago there was a case in Israel where a 16 year old boy met a woman on the internet that he thought was another teenaged girl in Jerusalem. They were carrying on this sort of cyber affair and they made arrangements to meet. He thought he was meeting the girl of his dreams. The woman turned out to be a lure for terrorists. Her accomplices kidnapped the boy and drove him out to the outskirts of Ramallah and shot him to death in a hail of bullets.
After searching for a few days the police were able to find his body and crack the case by tracking the signals emanating from his cell phone.
I get the feeling that something like this cannot happen in this country as long as police are not allowed to track cell phone signals.
Posted by: Malaika Martin | Dec 12, 2005 3:00:53 AM
Fear, the great motivator towards the loss (or the giving up) of responsibility and our Constitutionally mandated rights. Your daughter as an example of why to give up privacy is typical of this pact w/the devil. Another case of a shortsighted exchange where what you give up has much larger longer term implications that it appears to. It's like we're constantly willing to trust that everything will be OK until the next time our gov't or corporations w/overarching goals decides to do what's best for us, again ;-)
Remember the trust that went into our country believing in Iraqi WMDs and the infamous and still active Patriot Act. How many Patriot Act enforcements have been made based on the original intention of this Act? Actually very few, well that is unless environmentalists are now commonly considered terrorists (which to some lumber companies they are ;-).
Young people don't know any better which is why they give their info up so easily, and they haven't learned the lessons of gov'ts gone haywire like the Nazis. Why is it that the Europeans have had such strong privacy regulations for so long? Though lately, it seems like the U.S. has been putting enough economic pressures on them for many of these European gov'ts to start violating the pact they have had w/their constituents, which is indeed a shame.
Posted by: P-Air | Dec 13, 2005 1:40:40 AM
Privacy analysts divide the population into 3 categories. “Privacy fundamentalists” are deeply concerned about privacy rights and reject any consumer benefits that require release of data about themselves. At the other end of the spectrum are “the privacy unconcerned”, who don’t think about privacy, don’t see any problem about giving their information away or how it might be used. In the middle are “privacy pragmatists” who balance the potential benefits and threats involved in sharing information and are concerned about “function creep” (ie the secondary use of information originally divulged for one purpose only.) Pragmatists will give up protection depending on what they get in return. For example, some consumers would give up privacy for better service, but not price discounts.
Posted by: David Jacobson | Dec 24, 2005 5:23:35 PM
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