The behavioral economics of privacy, publicy, and the continuation of self

Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, has done great research into the conflicts we have over privacy and publicy: how willing are we to reveal ourselves.

Somini Sengupta, Web Privacy, and How Consumers Let Down Their Guard

Aiming to learn how consumers determine the value of their privacy, Mr. Acquisti dispatched a set of graduate students to a suburban mall on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. To some shoppers, the students offered a $10 discount card, plus an extra $2 discount in exchange for their shopping data. Half declined the extra offer — apparently, they weren’t willing to reveal the contents of their shopping cart for a mere $2.

To other shoppers, however, the students offered a different choice: a $12 discount card and the option of trading it in for $10 if they wished to keep their shopping record private. Curiously, this time, 90 percent of shoppers chose to keep the higher-value coupon — even if it meant giving away the information about what they had bought.

Why such contradictory responses?

To Mr. Acquisti, the results offered a window into the tricks our minds can play. If we have something — in this case, ownership of our purchase data — we are more likely to value it. If we don’t have it at the outset, we aren’t likely to pay extra to acquire it. Context matters.

It also matters how we define privacy. Conventional wisdom around Web privacy policies rests on the notion that consumers will make intelligent choices. At a recent industry conference in San Francisco, Erin Egan, the chief privacy officer for Facebook, defined privacy as “understanding what happens to your data and having the ability to control it.”

Mr. Acquisti, however, suggests that control can be false comfort. In one of his most intriguing experiments, he summoned student volunteers to take an anonymous survey on vice.

The participants were asked whether they had ever stolen anything, lied or taken drugs. Some were told that their answers would be published in a research bulletin, others were asked for explicit permission to publish those answers, and still others were asked for permission to publish the answers as well as their age, sex and country of birth.

The results revealed the imperfection of human reasoning. Those who were offered the least control over who would see their answers seemed most reluctant to reveal themselves: among them, only 15 percent answered all 10 questions. Those who were asked for consent were nearly twice as likely to answer all questions. And among those who were asked for demographic information, every single person gave permission to disclose the data, even though those details could have allowed a complete stranger a greater chance of identifying the participant.

Mr. Acquisti took note of the paradox: fine-grained controls had led people to “share more sensitive information with larger, and possibly riskier, audiences.” He titled the paper, which he wrote with his colleagues Laura Brandimarte and George Loewenstein, “Misplaced Confidences: Privacy and the Control Paradox.”

“What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”

I see these behaviors from the perspective of the ‘continuation of self’. Once a person has provided detailed information about themsleves — and gotten the sense of reward that comes from talking (or thinking) about who they are demographically or narratively, they then will naturally want to share that, to continue the positive feelings of narrative about self. This is the publicy urge.

The first case I think hinges on the shift of emphasis in the $12 card. It seems to be affirming the value of information about the person’s choices, where in the case of the additional $2, my sense is that it makes the information seem cheap, since $2 is less than $10. A logical trap, yes, but again associated with the abiding desire for a belief in the value of self narrative, which is the best way to think of our data exhaust: it doesn’t seem like a possession, but a by-product of self-expression.

31 March 2013 8 Permalink

Big Social Data Will Be Used Against Us

This is not a fantasy: corporations will use social data analysis like that outlined in the scenario below to make decisions on hires. They will infer who has migraines, drinks too much, screws around, or is a closet socialist. 

Facebook’s Generation Y nightmare - Frédéric Filloux

“Tina Porter, 26. She’s what you need for the transpacific trade issues you just mentioned, Alan. Her dissertation speaks for itself, she even learned Korean…”

He pauses.

“But?…” Asks the HR guy.

“She’s afflicted with acute migraine. It occurs at least a couple of times a month. She’s good at concealing it, but our data shows it could be a problem,” Chen says.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Well, she falls into this particular Health Cluster. In her Facebook babbling, she sometimes refers to a spike in her olfactory sensitivity – a known precursor to a migraine crisis. In addition, each time, for a period of several days, we see a slight drop in the number of words she uses in her posts, her vocabulary shrinks a bit, and her tweets, usually sharp, become less frequent and more nebulous. That’s an obvious pattern for people suffering from serious migraine. In addition, the Zeo Sleeping Manager website and the stress management site HeartMath – both now connected with Facebook – suggest she suffers from insomnia. In other words, Alan, we think you can’t take Ms Porter in the firm. Our Predictive Workforce Expenditure Model shows that she will cost you at least 15% more in lost productivity. Not to mention the patterns in her Facebook entries suggesting a 75% chance for her to become pregnant in the next 18 months, again according to our models.”

“Not exactly a disease from what I know. But OK, let’s move on”.

Corporations will conceal their decision-making processes when it collides with privacy regulations and government restrictions on discrimination, most likely by outsourcing head-hunting to outside companies, who will outsource finding the best candidates to other outside companies, who will use programs rented from even more outside companies. They are doing this already: this is mainstream.

24 September 2012 21 Permalink

Where Is Marshall McLuhan When We Need Him?

I recently stumbled upon an October 17 2011 jeremiad by Nathan Jurgenson calling for public intellectuals to regain the lost ground in technology writing that has been yielded to business-oriented writers:

Nathan Jurgenson, The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual?

My goal in this short piece is to encourage the reader to take a look at these two essays in tandem to suggest a further conversation about the need for public intellectuals, the role of academics in framing theories of new technologies and what the consequences are when we leave this discussion to be dominated by business folks.

Jurgenson’s post uses Larry Sanger’s Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? and Evengy Morozov’s The Internet Intellectual as a two-lane point of departure, and as a result Jurgenson winds up commenting on Jarvis’ techno-utopian views on the privacy-publicy debate (which Jarvis calls publicness, and Jurgenson calls publicity). That debate is actually a side track to Jurgenson’s actual point:

My problem is really not with Jarvis, but the fact that these “books that should have remained a tweet”, as Morozov states, have dominated the conversation about what the rise of new and social media means. I do not care that these fun little books exist, but that they are dominating the public conversation.

Perhaps the fault lies with the more rigorous intellectuals, both in and outside academia, who have made themselves largely absent from the public conversation about new technologies? Where is the Marshall McLuhan of social media? Why is it that Jeff Jarvis is setting the public conversation on publicity, Andrew Keen on amateurism, Tapscott and Williams on prosumption, Siva Vaidhyanathan on the impact of Google on society or Chris Anderson on abundance economies and “free”? To be clear, I think it is good that these folks hit on important topics in a catchy way. But they cannot be the whole picture, nor should they even be at the center. None of them provide a rigorous historical or theoretical treatment of their topics. (We called out Siva Vaidhyanathan on this blog after attending his a-theoretical talk at a public university).

If we can indeed convince more scholars to take on these topics, and there are many who are doing so already, do they have any chance at being public intellectuals? That is, can the ideas be delivered in a way that engages those interested, regardless if they have a degree in any specific field? For intellectuals to be public intellectuals they will need to be as engaging of writers as those authors listed above.

Or maybe the blame for the Sesame Street level books that dominate tech-writing is that publishers simply are not allowing public intellectuals to publish their ideas? I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has insights into this area.

In the meantime, I think the two essays linked to above are an important pairing to start a conversation over who gets to frame how new technologies are understood. Will it be a-historical, a-theoretical, non-rigorous business folks or can we inspire a new wave of technology-centered public intellectuals?

I consider myself a public intellectual, I guess. And I agree with a lot of Jurgenson and Sanger are saying (less so Morozov). However, I don’t side with the Nick Carr and Andrew Keen that the web is making us stupid, any more than Tapscott’s argument that Google makes memorization passé, or Shirky’s arguments that books like War and Peace are no longer worth the effort.

But this is just another example of the extremes dominating the discourse, which is a game that the media are happy to play, and sells lots of fun, little books. But then again, didn’t Marshall McLuhan write a lot of fun, little books?

[Returning again to the proximate cause — the privacy-publicy debate — I agree that no contemporary book pulls together all the threads well. All I can do today is offer a sampler of some of my writing on the subject, which I confess has not been smoothed into a single long form piece, although I would like to do so. For those interested, see A Publicy Reader.]

24 July 2012 8 Permalink

Publicy Is An Emergent Property of Social Networks

Megan Garber looks at some new research on privacy considerations in Facebook photo tagging by João Paulo Pesce and others, and boils it down for us:

On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy - Megan Garber via The Atlantic

The upshot? “Photo-tags can threaten privacy burdens in an indirect way,” the authors note, “by pinpointing the nodes in the social graphs on which privacy-attacking algorithms may extract information, thus enhancing their accuracy.” The social networks themselves, the researchers suggest, could work to solve that problem — by, say, creating a “hiding” feature that would allow users to disguise tags and prevent their unauthorized use without fully deleting them. Which would definitely be a nice thing to have. But the real solution, it seems, will be a social one, fit for the age of the social network. And it will start with users re-conceiving of themselves not simply as users sharing their own information, but as actors and influencers who are responsible for the network at large.

To turn this around, away from the conventional conservation-of-privacy ideal, we can say that publicy is an outcome of the social actions of social network participants, an emergent property. As individual’s add social metadata incrementally, others — or algorithms — could explore that metadata and be able to make potentially revealing inferences, like who was with who at a bar, what Facebook friends are actually close, and what connections are romantically involved.

Source: The Atlantic

26 April 2012 13 Permalink

What The Strip-Search Case Says About Privacy

The lack of moral outrage around the recent Supreme Court case — finding that anyone charged of a crime can be strip searched, even when there is no evidence of contraband or concealed weapons — may be the result of the relaxation of our sense of privacy, in general.

Strip-Search Case Reflects Death of American Privacy - Noah Feldman via  Bloomberg

There are two main drivers pushing privacy into the dustbin of history, and both are related to technology. One is the increasing effectiveness of government surveillance. Cameras follow you in most public places in London today, and New York is catching up. Diffusion scanners at the airport already show you essentially naked. The coalition Conservative-Liberal Democratic government in the U.K. is preparing to allow the state to collect, without a warrant or even suspicion, all information on calls or texts except the content. The government’s ability to do all of these things causes many of us to think, irrationally, that it is reasonable for it to do so.

The other driving force is our increasing willingness to sacrifice privacy for practical advantage. When you sign up for a free Gmail account, you agree to allow a computer program to read all your e-mails. This is hardly a secret: The ads that pop up on your browser often relate to the text of the e-mail you have sent or received. Google Inc. gambled that people would rationalize the loss of privacy by saying that no human was reading the text. Google was right. The list goes on: Global-positioning-system technology on your mobile phone helps you find out where you are — and enables anyone with access to your provider to do the same.

We all know that our sense of privacy has been changing. It seems that every time you ride the bus you hear one-half of the most intimate conversations imaginable — emanating from a total stranger with a phone to his ear. The justices cannot help but be affected by these trends. Privacy is defined constitutionally by “reasonable expectation” of what should be private. This may sound circular, but it is in fact inevitable. The concept of privacy is inherently flexible, and the less we value it, the less our judicial institutions will protect it for us.

And if we drop our ‘reasonable expectations’ then we may be less surprised when people have to drop their pants, as well.

We are moving to a coercively public society, where publicy is the norm, and privacy — or the demand for it — will be cast as the intimation of illegal, immoral, or unreasonable behavior. This is why prospective employers believe they are justified in asking candidates for their facebook passwords, despite the illegality of ‘show-ercion’ of this sort.

And the publicy bias is going to grow.

Source: bloomberg.com

10 April 2012 9 Permalink