Moderator: Natalie Fonseca, Co-founder and Executive Producer, Privacy Identity Innovation
Chris Babel, CEO, TRUSTe
Terence Craig, Co-founder and CEO, PatternBuilders and Co-author, Privacy and Big Data
Fatemeh Khatibloo, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Anne Toth, VP of Policy and Compliance Strategy, Slack
Natalie kicks this panel off the Privacy, Identity and Innovation 2014 conference (#pii2014). What’s the data-driven economy mean? We’ve been talking about that, last event in Seattle. Chris, what impact at TRUSTe?
Chris: they do a consumer survey in January: 92% in US said they were concerned and 75% were worried about privacy–mostly about what businesses are doing with their info. Policy discussion in Europe has begun.
Fatemeh: market research from July 2013 and June, we saw similar numbers with higher number of people willing to do something about it. 16% were doing something in 2013, sense of fatalism; 52% in 2014.
Terence: in Europe, Right to be Forgotten and other regulations.
Anne: a lot of consumers say they’re concerned but they don’t understand behavioral advertising or offline data economy. Snowden helped. Now data breaches are more meaningful, consumers could be suffering from these.
Natalie: after revelations and data breaches, it’s not “new” anymore. So many are affected. What about fatigue due to problems happening everywhere, or that it’s a lost cause?
Chris asked audience: who hasn’t received a data breach notification? (three in audience) Most people download or “give me free Wi-Fi,” but consumers are becoming increasingly aware. For the majority, even the tech savvy are still not that familiar.
Anne: consumers are lazy. I’m lazy. I use the same password for the everything. People don’t change the default password. I’d love to be as libertarian as my friends, but people are too busy to think through things.
Fatemeh: we’re talking about business privacy. Some companies have 1500 attributes about each of us. I’m conscious of trying to address everything in the same way. We can inspire action in different ways.
Anne: benefit vs risk. I’d love it if everything in my pantry were RFID tagged and I could run through the checkout at the store, but everything would have RFID and everyone would know what’s in my house. As long as consumers see benefits, they’re going to use things.
Terance: if you want to participate in the digital economy, you have no choice. Shadow economy between the consumers and government. Gov can’t collect but they can buy it–everything is available. That relationship, with security and data management companies, is concerning.
Natalie: A lot of start-ups in the data privacy area developing new tools. Big players: they can sue the gov for spying on them, but they’re also at the center of a lot of concerns about personal privacy. Apple, Yahoo practices also questionable.
Terance: it’s a difficult problem. Snowden raised concerns. Repressive regimes. Google “tries to protect privacy” in the context of using their service.
Chris: encryption: global rules not working. Business interests are aligned with consumers on this. Technology will circumvent problems.
Terance: many companies focus on child porn, shows how impoverished the industry is.
Anne: businesses are generally responsive to consumers, but they aren’t demanding it.
Fatemeh: how much does this detract from people’s other interacting with privacy technology?
Natalie: Even five years ago, people posting info about themselves and how that gets reused. Now Internet of Things (IoT) is a game changer. Where to go from here?
Anne: identify and limit the harms. Drinking game. Hard to limit at the point of collection – everything causes data, horse is out of the barn.
Fatemeh: I’m interested in P2P privacy, example of surveillance in a personal world. Raises the conversation.
Terance: change distribution, moving into global village, especially with IoT. We want these great benefits in health, will need to trade to allow data monitoring. That’s the world we live in.
Chris: It’s great for me. Real value, exponential power is in personal info sharing.
Anne: I trust you to look at my Nest data, I trust Nest, but I don’t trust Google. (Note: Google owns Nest.)
Natalie: Lack of info on how to use things, data, privacy implications. Do companies need to step up and offer better information on what they’re doing, how I sell my services?
Fatemeh: As I logged into the Marriott app, got screen about sending notifications that were informative, made her conscious about some of the choices that she’s making, asking permission. User-centered design. No reason we can’t use it elsewhere.
Terance: is that worth the investment?
Fatemeh: privacy and consumers is my focus. Small changes have impact.
Anne: consumers don’t care. People assume that privacy and security are safe, like planes don’t fall out of the sky.
Audience: why do we expect consumers to take charge?
Anne: I don’t think we do, it’s not reasonable. You can force a user to change default password, protecting consumer from themselves. You can’t do everything. No one universal sets of considerations, try to find the sweet spot. It’s a point of a lot of debate.
Chris: from engineering, consumer didn’t have a choice. My big “aha” is that every consumer has a different view. His customers are trying different things as differentiators. One company that reaches above raises the bar for others.
Terance: a friend helped develop the webcam, set red light indicator on when in use. Consumers didn’t like it.
