Apparently, LinkedIn has recently done us the “favor” of having a default setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising. A friend forwarded me this alert (from a friend, from a friend…) this morning.
Since Facebook has been such a good model of creative “reuse” of our personal information, and consequent destruction of personal trust in social settings, it seems corporately fitting that LinkedIn would try the same.
Coaching moment: Doesn’t it bother you when people make self-serving assumptions about what you want to share with others? True, you did voluntarily share this information, but shouldn’t you be able to express clear limits on how this shared information is used—before it’s misused? I think so!
Social networks are great places to share links, photos, status updates, and more. It often appears that we are the beneficiaries of our personal information sharing. However, we are not the only ones. A much greater benefit accrues to an industry that is, at its core, about public manipulation. Whether we want or need something that they’re pushing is not the point; this is about moving goods, selling units, enhancing commerce and the GDP.
What does this industry see in us (besides our wallet)?
Coaching moment: As a culture, we’ve never been in a position before where we needed to be so self-aware about our communications. We’ve never been so open and vulnerable to the slings and arrows of others. Like any profitable middleman, the Advertising/Marketing Industry justifies its existence in ways that extract a value from our shared information. Their efforts target us with more effective and personally customized messages, but at many different costs to us.
Does advertising make us better people? Does it contribute to more enlightened culture? A better world? All arguable points.
How does it benefit you? What personal information are you willing to give away in support of this industry? Have you found a balance between your personal interests and the influence of others? Do you like television and magazine ads, or highway billboards?
Yes, there are tradeoffs with advertising. I’m just asking if you like these things as a mode of communication. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Creative commons photo credit: x-ray delta one on flickr. Thanks!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an informative article called What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? I was surprised to learn that if I know your gender, zip code, and birthday, there’s a high likelihood that I know exactly who you are.
Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there’s an 87% chance that you don’t share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident. Second, there may be particular data sources available (Sweeney used a Massachusetts voter registration database) that let people do searches to bootstrap what they know about someone in order to learn more — including traditional identifiers like name and address. In a very concrete sense, “anonymized” or “merely demographic” information about people may be neither.
Coaching moment: Think of how many grocery store, membership applications, and online accounts have your name, zip code, gender and birth date. Many of the contractual terms that we agree to when we apply for these services make reference to how the company plans to use their data. In some cases, they claim to use “aggregated data” which does not identify us by name. However, if we put a few of these databases together (you know this is happening, right?), there’s a lot of data available about us. Specifically.
Think about who is asking for your data, and what need they might have for it. I encourage you to think more critically about your data sharing practices. It might not be safe to think that anonymized data stays that way.
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