In the absence of privacy: how enterprises can turn weakness into strength by introducing trusted mobile solutions
Google+ is only a next step to cement the dominance of Internet and mobile leaders such as facebook, Google or Apple. The corner stones of their power are closed systems, social inclusion and consequent exploitation of customer data. But consumers as well as legislators have become wary: privacy has made it to the top of the agenda.
For enterprises the time is now to come up with useful solutions that value privacy as competitive advantage.
These days we witness the final fall of the last resort that had not yet become a complete victim of big business commercialisation: our private life. After some failures even Google has found a "as it looks today" successful way of entering the social realm eventually. Now that with Google+ search results will even become dependent on our social behaviour enterprises will even more embrace Google’s advertizing model. And the more successful the solution the more users who will sacrify their privacy without even thinking about it.
One of the most obvious privacy risk has become the ubiquity of location data. While many niche solutions protect this data it is no secret that the internet giants store and use it – usually without the users approval. Be it geo-tagged photos, checked-in locations of social networks or even the original GPS signal of the mobile phone: recent data scandals show that users need to actively think about if and how they use innovative devices and services. Thanks to HTML5 even mere browsing of a website on a mobile phone can reveal the exact GPS location of a user today.
A similar erosion of privacy can we witnessed with the introduction of facial recognition software at facebook. Once this kind of software "knows" your face it can bring together your face with your name, address and other personal information – not just from facebook, but also from other websites that show your foto. Of course this matching information can and will eventually be sold to third parties: "you have a foto of somebody who entered your store? We tell you who it is (if you pay us)".
It is important to understand privacy aspects on a broader scale: search engine usage, social networking, location services or shopping and payment transactions all leave traces that can be used for commercial purposes. An interesting example that computes nearly all of the above mentioned data is credit scoring: often non-transparent criteria decide whether a customer gets a loan or not based on data that can be bought or found on the web. Usually customers are not even aware that available data is also being used for such purposes.
This gets even worse with global authentication methods that make it convenient to use one login for several services, because it makes it easier for enterprises to consolidate data. Therefore large web players make it more and more "convenient" for their users to disclose their data.
It is alarming that all these innovations take place in more or less closed systems. New privacy relevant features are being introduced without even asking the customer, articles or apps are being deleted without generally accepted rules.
While all these solutions without doubt provide usefull and desirable features, their success based on the ignorance of privacy will also lead to counter movements. Nobody can predict the impact of these counter movements, but they will be lead by sceptical users and regulators of countries who have a long standing history of protecting the indiviual’s privacy.
So what will happen?
The majority will still use such services and accept the loss of privacy with arguments like "if you do nothing wrong, you don’t need to be afraid of transparency". Others will draw the consequences and only use them to a limited scope. For example only keeping their facebook account to be able to receive facebook messages and email, but not actively use it anymore. Or they will use Google as mere search engine without maintaining a Google account. Few will be sceptic and maybe even deem those solutions as not usable anymore.
But this also means that other solutions have the chance to become more popular. Especially if users are willing to accept the loss of total data transparency while gaining more variety and specific solutions that are tailored to their context and needs.
For enterprises this means that the time is now to come up with useful solutions that value privacy as competitive advantage. Why being dependent on others when they can approach their own customer base of several thousands customers directly? With a strong focus on privacy they can provide own solutions embracing innovative technologies such as cross mobile platform services, social networking or location based services.
And: the biggest hurdle so far – actually developing complex and cross mobile platform services for global audiences – has become less daunting: sophisticated technology platforms, such as Pocketweb’s Pocket Life Platform, these days offer ways to choose from proven and integrated LBS, social media or messaging modules that can be rebranded and fitted to corporate needs. Within weeks services can be customized, integrated with the enterprise back end and made available across mobile platforms.
This way enterprises can leverage their trusted brands and create mobile social media services that are centered on strict privacy and security policies. While today’s users might be willing to ignore their loss of privacy, future mainstream users might even be open to pay for privacy.
Alexander Koeppen and Michael Heinzel are co-founders of Pocketweb, a global innovator that integrates location based and social media services across web and mobile platforms and makes them easily accessible to consumers and organizations.