Posts tagged as:

Zuckerberg, Facebook & the Privacy Paradox

by on January 15, 2010 · 10 comments

Over this past week, a lot of people were making hay over this recent ReadWriteWeb story, “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over.” Seems that some people were taking issue with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s suggestion that Facebook’s recent site policy changes, which generally encouraged more sharing or information, were in line with public expectations.  Most people put words in Zuckerberg’s mouth and accused him of saying that “privacy is over” or that he claimed he “is a prophet,” neither of which he actually said.  But let’s ignore the fact that some people made stuff up and get back to the point: What set people off about Facebook’s recent site changes and Zuckerberg’s rationalization of them?

I think it goes back to the fact that a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too. “It is the paradox of the cyber era,” notes Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson: We are “a nation of exhibitionists demanding privacy.”  Indeed, that’s true, but there’s a good reason why this so-called “privacy paradox” exists. As Larry Downes, author of the brilliant new book, The Laws of Disruption, argues:

People value their privacy, but then go out of their way to give it up. There’s nothing paradoxical about it. We do value privacy. It’s just that we’re willing to trade it for services we value even more. Consumers intuitively look at the information being requested and decide whether the value they receive for disclosing it is worth the cost of their privacy. (p. 80)

That’s exactly right. When confronted with real world choices about privacy and information sharing, we often are willing to accept some trade-offs in exchange for something of value. But when we are asked about this process we are loathe to admit that we would willingly engage in such privacy-for-services trade-offs even if we do it every day of our lives.  As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch rightly points out:

Continue reading →

SHARE: 10 comments

Feedsqueezer: Another Competitor for Google

by on January 24, 2009 · 10 comments

Those who criticize Google as a “monopoly” usually focus on the search and advertising markets.  Google may indeed have a huge lead in those markets, but it is by no means a “monopoly” in the strict sense of the word as the only (“mono-“) seller in that market.  

If the critics are concerned about about true “monopoly” or at least something close to it, perhaps they ought to focus on Feedburner, the free service Google acquired back in 2007.  If one takes a very narrow definition of the service Feedburner offers, one could argue that there is no real alternative to Feedburner.  But on the other hand:

I have a very simple solution. I use my own RSS feed I don’t need some other company providing a enhanced solution. I have never understood why people used feedburner at all. Getting statistics from a feed is elementary. There are several services out their that provide podcast statistics. Stupidity in giving someone else control over ones feed is something I will never get. I have no sympathy for those having feedburner issues.

Regardless, some leading bloggers have expressed outrage over Feedburner’s less-than-perfect reliability—see this recent rant by Michael Arrington.  But we call in the federales to “fix” the “problem”—if one properly apply that term to a free service beloved by (nearly all) bloggers everywhere just because it’s not absolutely, positively 100% reliable or instantaneous or simply because some people don’t like the idea of using yet another Google product, no matter how good it is—let’s see what Feedsqueezer, a soon-to-be-launched service, will offer.

Note:  The word “monopoly” is now commonly used to mean “control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.”  It’s not obvious what that would mean in the case of those Google services, that are both free to the user and not directly related to any price paid by, say an advertiser—as distinct from, say, Adwords or Adsense, where there are at least prices that might, in theory, be controlled.

SHARE: 10 comments