Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
When I first heard of the pii2010 (privacy identityinnovation) conference, I had my concerns. I imagined an endless series oftechnical lectures on installing web security. It sounded dreadful.
Because I have certain masochistic tendencies, I spent Wednesdayat the conference, which in fact proved to be a brilliant, human andthought-provoking discussion of social questions rather than technical architectures, posedby strikingly intelligent speakers and participants. I loved every minute of it.
One theme that kept arising, much to the chagrin of some participants, was the monetization potential in the privacy space. It’slargely uncharted and unconquered territory, likely because entrepreneurs view “privacy”as a frustrating PR hurdle rather than a market. But privacy raises bigquestions that require big solutions, and if you’re looking to get into amarket before anyone else notices it’s there, you should be looking at privacy.
Here are four of the hundreds of questions raised at pii, along with the marketsquietly building beneath them. There are plenty more where these came from. Go next year.
The Question: Howare employers expected to use the social web to make hiring decisions?
A recentMicrosoft-sponsored study found that 70% of hiring managers have rejectedcandidates based on information they found online about the candidate.
“So they broke the law,” commented a panelist.
But you’d have to be crazy to hire someonewithout Googling them or checking their Facebook page. I don’t know a singlewoman who will go on a date without first running a Google search. Of course employersare going to be Googling.
One can argue that this is fair, because when we putsomething on Facebook or Twitter or a blog, we’re essentially making a publicspeech. But what about the things other people write about us on Twitter and onblogs, true or not? What about the photos they post and label? What about ourpast legal and credit entanglements? What about the false accusations of others? As Michael Fertikof ReputationDefenders.com noted in his keynote, the media is far better atcovering accusations than eventual acquittals, and Google’s indexing processreflects this.
In the future, will we expect employers to review social webdata in hiring decisions? Say an elementary school hires a teacher with a cleanlegal record and a perverted Twitter feed. If the children are later exposedto inappropriate material, are the employers liable? Is it going to become an employer’sduty to review key online aspects of an applicant’s persona?
The Markets: Youcan follow this two ways. There is a service like Fertik’s ReputationDefenders, which assists in both crisis management and preventative measuresfor online reputations – a service which has seen phenomenal growth and minimalcompetition in recent years. And then there is a service like panelist PeterKazanjy’s private-beta Unvarnished (getunvarnished.com), which essentiallyserves as a way for users to pseudonymously comment on a person’s workperformance (think glassdoor.com for individuals). Kazanjy swears these pseudonymsare, behind the scenes, linked to actual identities and tracked for authority,but the room engaged in mass eye-rolling every time he discussed his product.
While the concept lacked support from this particularaudience (although, in his defense, I thought he made a lot of interesting andpotentially even valid points about the value of more public data than less), themarket for such a service seems imminent. When you think about thepublic support for websites like hollaback,it’s not hard to imagine the next step being something like Unvarnished. Youjust have to find a CEO who’s as willing as Kazanjy to toe the party line inthe face of daily public floggings.
The Question:Does the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act unfairly force children tochoose between exclusion from the social web and lying about their age?
COPPA, enacted in 1998, details the responsibilities anoperator assumes to protect the privacy and safety of individuals under 13. Itdoes not expressly prevent these individuals from giving out their personalinformation, but the paperwork and potential repercussions of a violationresult in a significant number of web properties (like Facebook) opting toprohibit the under-13 set from participating. Of course, no one’s checking IDs,so the kids lie.
This one struck a nerve for me. I have a vivid memory ofbeing an 11-year-old gymnast, active in a Prodigy bulletin board (old school!) about gymnastics. Withoutwarning, the board became 13-and-over only, and I was blocked. I ran sobbing toparents, devastated to have the community I loved pulled out from under me. Icried until my face was raw. My father changed the age on my account to 13 so Icould participate. But now I was racked with guilt about The Giant Lie. Now Iwas being dishonest with the community I loved! At age eleven, the spectrum ofhonesty looks very black and white, and I felt like a dark, horrid impostor, abona fide Bad Person. I stopped participating entirely, and I changed my ageback to the truth. (A slew of bouncers in my hometown can assure you I hadno such compunctions about veracity by age eighteen.)
Nearly twenty years later, I still have a visceral responseto that memory. It’s something I was pleased to see addressed at pii from theperspective of children’s rights. The social web is ubiquitous, and kids wantand expect to participate wholly. While we try to look out for their bestinterests with these laws, we also put them in the awful position of having tolie to participate in a conversation we like to consider global.
The Markets:Consulting with websites to navigate and streamline the legal pathways towardincluding the under-13s. Serving as an intermediary between the legal guardiansof the kids, their data, and the online properties (i.e. a service thatfacilitates a parent legally consenting to their child’s creation of a true-ageFacebook page or otherwise sharing data online).
The Question: Howdo you handle death on social media?
Currently, most online services have no way for a deceased’sloved ones to access a password-protected account. These online lives are justleft lingering mid-air, like DJ AM’s ominous final Twitter update.Should loved ones be able to access these accounts after a death? What shouldhappen to your personal data after you die?
The Markets: Datawills. Password lockers. Integrated apps that facilitate the online mourningprocess.
The Question: Will we eventually use a centralized store for our online data?
We trust our money to our banks and to our government. Weknow exactly whom we’ve trusted with every cent of our money, and we canmove it back and forth between financial institutions with confidence. We can invest and trade it. There is no such concept for our valuable onlinedata – it’s such a shadowy area that a panelist asked for terminologysuggestions from the audience. Is this a data store? Data vault? Data bank?Data service?
“Wait — what, specifically, are we even talking about?”asked a participant.
“We’re still trying to work that out,” thepanelist responded.
Who would we trust to operate this “data bank” anyway?The audience voted, and the top response was “no one.” After that came thegovernment. Facebook received zero votes.
The Market: Builda system for consumers to track, invest and move their online data. Sell it tothe government. Duck.
