As promised in Nothing New Under the Sun (Privacy), I'm going to start an arc on online privacy. I'll be posting about the history of privacy, privacy in commerce, and what privacy means to the individual.Just so you'll know, what I'll be posting here is from my next book, Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 7, "Experience Versus Expectation":
Anyone familiar with the state of the web at the time of this writing knows that privacy and identity are the topics du jour. People tend to think of privacy and identity as the polar opposites on some scale and they're not (at least in a social commerce setting). You can have complete personal privacy yet have a very public identity and you can have zero personal privacy yet be someone completely unknown to others, just a face in the crowd. The reason for this is that "privacy" isn't what most people think it is. Most people think Privacy and Identity as polar extremes with Anonymity as the slider from one end of the scale to the other.
That's shown in the following figure.Privacy -- or at least what people think of as "privacy" at the start of the 21st century -- is a relatively new historical phenomenon.
The social commerce scale which has existed as long as humans walked the earth actually has Anonymity and Identity as polar extremes with Privacy as the slider in between.
To be either known or unknown depends on how much of yourself you're willing to share and with whom you're willing to share it. This is shown in the following figure.People browse your website, or they pick up your brochure at a kiosk or in a store, or they walk past your booth at a tradeshow -- all of these people have at least one thing in common; They all want to be left alone until they're ready to not be left alone. In other words, they want to remain anonymous in a social commerce setting, and specifically, they want to remain anonymous until they no longer want to remain anonymous. Anonymity occurs when someone decides they want to be unknown. (to be continued...)
(text and images copyright Joseph Carrabis and NextStage Evolution 2006-2007)
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Tracked on: December 2, 2006 7:28 AM | Permalink to Trackback