Information Professionals Don’t Care About Privacy
This was a really thought provoking presentation and discussion facilitated by Nika Smith, user experience consultant for Blink Interactive. Nika’s presentation slides can be accessed on slideshare. Nika gave an overview of privacy and security concerns regarding the information industry, her conclusion being that most information professionals in these days of social software and web 2.0 don’t care enough about privacy. She mentioned an infamous quote from Vint Cerf of Google fame: “Nothing you do ever goes away, and nothing you do ever escapes notice… there isn’t any privacy, get over it.” She also mentioned an alarming statistic: in a recent study, 60% of internet users are not worried about the information available about them online. There was some audience discussion about how obtuse most privacy policies are when signing up for a new web service- one audience member said that he does everything he can to actively circumvent having to read the online privacy policies. Another audience member said that they thought privacy policies were actually written in a language intended to discourage average people from reading them.
She then recommended four major principles for companies to consider adopting in order to improve privacy on the internet, and elaborated on each principle:
- support awareness and notification
- ask for consent and offer choices for participation
- offer granular levels of control
- protect the user from harm
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1. Support awareness and notification.
This can be accomplished by using clear, consistent terminology; making users privacy settings easy to access from any point in the interface; providing access to help from any point in the interface; prominently displaying any changes to the privacy policies or site settings; disclosing what information will be shared or made public before the user submits their information (an audience member stated “ask for permission rather than forgiveness.”); and disclosing how any information about the user will be used.
