the great pivot to privacy
Like the surveillance economy but now with privacy.
Google and Facebook are trying to redefine themselves as privacy-focused companies, but that framing is at odds with their lucradive business models.
Consider the following:
- Google and Facebook make money by monetizing people's data.
- They built targeted advertising platforms that are powered by user data generated from their free services (e.g. Gmail, Google Search, Facebook Newsfeed, etc.)
- It turns out that the history of someone's interactions with a digital product can be highly predictive of who they are and what they like.
- Advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money to use this kind of data.
Neither company is backing away from their advertising business models yet, so either the privacy play is a distraction, or we're about to see two gigantic companies attempt to gracefully turn towards privacy.
The Pivots
- A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking, Facebook
- Building a More Private Web, Google
The Criticism
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Facebook launches 'clear history' tool – but it won't delete anything, The Guardian
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Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox, The Electronic Frontier Foundation