My silicon valley experience

In the last days I listened to two German podcasts (SWR2, Werbeblogger) talking about privacy in the times of the web2.0. Alot people are sharing information on the web that usually would supposed to be private. We publish photos on social networking platforms or flickr. We update people about the status of our relationship, who our friends are or where we are going to shop in a few minutes. Especially younger people care very little about this. But what happens if a potential future employer sees this picture of you being drunk or feels offended by your religious or politic views you publish on your facebook profile? Professional data collectors crawl the web for information about you to sell it to companies. Which kind of information are they really interested in and collecting and what are they really using this information for? If they go over your data to target advertisements better to your needs this might make some of us feel uneasy but on the other hand we might appreciate it because finally we get advertisements in our mail for the TV we are looking for instead of advertisements for window coverings or 24hr home care which we are not really looking for.

But apparently it’s really hard to find out what really is being done with our data. Which data do they have? Whom is it sold to and what do these people do with it? The journalists who did the SWR2 report (a public radio station) tried to find out. They asked different data collectors and companies for interviews about these questions. But those people were not willing to answer these questions and therefore didn’t give interviews to the journalists.

So the problem that interviewed experts on the show saw and with which I agree is the asymmetry in information. We have people willing to share really a lot of information on one hand and on the other hand we have people collecting and selling this information who are not willing at all to inform us what they do at all. People sharing their information probably would be willing to share a lot of information with their friends and only want to limit them selves in that as little as necessary. But which information should you share and which should you not share? -You can only have a vague idea because you have almost no idea what the other side is even interested in and even less what exactly they do and ow that will affect you.

We won’t be able to turn the time back and have people publish less information but maybe we can solve this problem of asymmetry?