DwightDeGroff.com - Tech that Matters

I blogged earlier about our tendency, as humans, to reveal more than we ought in on-line communication through portals like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Yet, these are but a few of the ways in which we often fail to safeguard the rights to privacy that we defend and claim to cherish. A NY Times article says that researchers refer to this as the “privacy paradox”.

normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.

Today, Google announced a new service called Google Latitude – a new service for mobile devices and “iGoogle” that allows users to views the location of their friends and loved ones (who have opted to share the information). It’s a pretty cool idea – basically you (the user) can opt to other specified users to see your geographic location and vice-versa. Purportedly, this information can be adjusted per “friend” to show the best approximation of your location, a city-level view, hide your location entirely or even to provide intentional false information. “No honey, I’m not out boozing it up with the guys… I’m… at work… <typetypetype> … check Latitude.”

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I like that Google is attempting to keep people safe from themselves with Latitude.

Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see.

It certainly sounds good… random people won’t be able to find out this private information about you, but what about not so random people… or groups? Google will happily keep your information to itself. It will happily track everywhere that you go, when you go there, how long you stay there and where you were before and after. They’ll track how long it took you to get there, how often you go there. Are you ready for location-based advertising? If you were a shop in New York City, wouldn’t you want to advertise to anyone walking on nearby streets? Sure you would and technology like this brings that closer and closer to reality.

Before I get you all up-in-arms over “privacy rights infringement” by Google, whether you opt-in to Google Latitude or not, you’re already sharing this information with cell phone service providers, GPS navigation companies, etc. Don’t get a privacy paradoxical on me!

Carnegie Mellon behavioral economist George Loewenstein along with his two colleagues, Leslie John and Alessandro Acquisti performed a study on the privacy paradox and found that our privacy principles are wobbly.

We are more or less likely to open up depending on who is asking, how they ask and in what context. In one experiment, one group of students was given a strong assurance that none of the information they divulged on the survey would be revealed. That should make them more forthcoming, right? Actually, the opposite was true. When the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else’s homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.

Pretty interesting stuff don’t you think? If Google hadn’t made such a big deal about all of the privacy features of Google Latitude I (along with many others) probably wouldn’t be blogging about it. Paradox shmaradox!

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