It's certainly a niche, but I'm not sure how many techy users really care about privacy. We all have Gmail accounts, right? Which store emailed passwords, password reset links, private conversations, account balances, and all sorts of other stuff?
Another data point... Our userbase at RescueTime is comprised almost entirely geeks. We measure and store second-by-second attention data on their computer. We make all sorts of privacy features available (ability to delete bits of data, track only whitelisted stuff, etc., etc.). The VAST majority of our users never touch any of these features.
And we're growing like gangbusters.
I think people who make the bet that people in the future are going to be increasingly privacy-conscious are making a pretty bad bet... But I do imagine that it will continue to be a niche (though likely a shrinking one).
I think you are right but in the short term only. I think long term there will be some huge flap involving online privacy and after that people will wake up to what the consequences can be.
Really? What can the consequences be? I'm not being flip-- I think it's easy to say that but its harder to pin down dangerous scenarios.
The increasing fact is that the more Google knows about you, the better they can serve up search results (and ads, of course). I think most users would NOT opt-out given the chance to do so (if it meant harming their search quality).
Related quote from Matt Cutts' blog:
"It’s a long article, but an example useful fact is that if X is the number of people who visit the Ad Preferences page and opt out, 10X people don’t opt out and 4X people actually edit their categories to improve the targeting relevance of the ads they see. Let me say that again: four times as many people change their settings to make their ads more relevant than opt out of interest-based targeting. I think the Ad Preferences page is a good example where users get more transparency and control regarding their privacy."
Let me give you just two possible scenarios, there are plenty more:
- An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers, figures out who is probably about to apply for coverage for a bunch of expensive treatments and cancels their insurance before they can make the claim for some trumped up reason.
- A political party gets their hands on this information and datamines it to the hilt in order to figure out which talking points to trot out on what TV stations in order to swing a maximum block of voters to them.
I'm sure there will be people that will say both of these are unrealistic, but I think that given the amount of data out there it is only a matter of time before someone will find a way to abuse it in a way that we will not be able to ignore.
>An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers
You mean like the AOL search data leak? I never read anything about insurance companies misappropriating the data in this manner. So I'd say its more of a long shot.
Same with political parties... again, never read anything like that.
Not to say that it hasn't happened, I'd be curious if anyone has any information to show if it has?
However there has been a lot of discussion about this recently - especially regarding search. I think there is a fair number of people for whom anonymous searching is important and that is only likely to get larger.
I don't think the debate is about privacy but more about how certain bits of information about people can be used to manipulate their attention in order to make money. Google uses the information it collects to serve more relevant ads but this is in a certain sense an unfair manipulation of your attention and this is what I find offensive.
"current privacy conscious climate" sounds like something Fox News would use. Just like we were all subjected to years of "...in these uncertain times." after 9/11.
And as said, this is probably the least privacy conscious the internet has ever been. Most people just don't care (They're also the ones clicking on ads).
I was more referring to the climate in places such as here (HN) and so forth. We fall quite squarely into his target audience (based on previous postings anyway) and a good proportion of us are security conscious now :)
