Published my first article!
July 17, 2011
I know I’ve been off the radar for a while but, to get things started again, I thought I’d share some great news — I just got my first article published! JOLT (Harvard’s Journal of Law and Technology) published a short piece by me entitled “Google+ Puts Premium on Privacy and Data Portability”, though I might suggest they change the name to something like “Google+ Puts Premium on Data Portability: But Is It Enough?”
The point of the article is straightforward: Google+, by simply entering the social networking market, is doing a lot of good for users. There’s increased focus on privacy and, given Google’s Data Liberation push, more about data portability. But, while that’s a step in the right direction, if we step back, it becomes clear that the real issue is that we keep giving incredible amounts of valuable personal information to a single company (be it Facebook, Google, Myspace, etc.). And, after we do that, we tend to feel locked in/invested in that company such that we are reluctant to leave it when either 1) they do something that upsets us or 2) we see another product that has the potential to be much better.
The same issue was seen with the recent Netflix price increase — everyone is pissed not only because price increases are always unpopular but because 1) there’s no good Netflix competitor (and thus it’s more difficult to voice discontent in a meaningful way [e.g., by switching providers]) and 2) even if there were a viable competitor, switching after a user has invested a non-trivial number of hours ranking movies in Netflix means losing out on a lot of earned value [surprisingly accurate movie recommendations].
In essence, a user information-based service like Netflix and Facebook gets stronger, and usually more valuable to users, the more data users feed it. This is a win-win until that service becomes so dominant that the incentives for innovation trail off and the concerns of, say, advertisers become more pressing than those of users. Because the user-side costs of switching are high, users feel locked in to a sub-par service. This locked-in feeling doesn’t just mean there’s less-than-ideal innovation in a field. Think about privacy as an example. For Fourth Amendment purposes, a persons “reasonable expectation of privacy” is crucial. Well, what’s reasonable? What someone thinks is reasonable tends to correspond quite highly with what they’re used to. Now, for instance, we all think it quite reasonable for our friends’ updates to show up on a constantly changing newsfeed on our Facebook front page. But, back when that feature was launched, people were up in arms; now, they can’t imagine Facebook without it. I’m not saying what Facebook or others have done is good or bad. But, it’s important for us to realize that users being locked in to these services might mean users forcing themselves to acclimate to things we might think not so great, and our conceptions of what is “reasonable” being shaped in non-ideal ways as a result. With competition, when we don’t like something we can act in meaningful ways to stop it — we up and leave.
I pose one solution in the article, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts! Feel free to post your comment directly on JOLT’s site or email me directly.