Digital Air and Digital Oil – why privacy matters
“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd in her riveting keynote at the WWW2010 conference. She makes some excellent points about Big Data, privacy and the importance of context in this highly recommended read.
So if data is digital air, what does it mean for the future of media? We’ve seen some monumental shifts in the industry during the last few years and we’re currently in the midst of an epic struggle between media and technology companies for control over a fragmented digital media universe. No one has a true monopoly over user attention on the Internet. In fact, content is now abundant and attention is scarce, so how do you find an audience in a media landscape in which no one is truly only consuming, but also creating, sharing and interacting?
By filtering the digital air supply — by aggregating and curating digital media and building better tools for consumers to create, access and share the media they want. That’s how you can attempt to capture audiences. And in a world where consumers have more choices than every before, the only way you can hope to keep their attention is by building trust.
As Danah Boyd points out. “Privacy is not about control over data nor is it a property of data. It’s about a collective understanding of a social situation’s boundaries and knowing how to operate within them”. In other words, privacy is all about trust and not violating user expectations around their data.
If Data is Digital Air, User Data is Digital Oil. It’s the data that fuels the Internet economy, but it’s also a scarce natural resource that is dependent on the ability to build and maintain user trust. Like oil, user data needs to be managed in a responsible, sustainable manner. If you violate user trust, you run the risk of turning away users and the data that comes with it.
Let’s prevent a digital oil crisis.
