Sam Lessin, the founder of private-sharing platform drop.io had this to say about privacy in a recent issue of BrandWeek:
It is now far more expensive to keep content
private than it is to publish it widely—not because of the rise in
security expense; because the costs of publishing information have
fallen more rapidly than those of private sharing. For all of human
history it's been more pricey to share information widely than
privately; now, the reverse is true.
To help users control private information, providers have developed
complex mechanisms that require ever-greater amounts of user input.
The most recognizable form of this is social networking. These
systems help users construct trusted identities and then define
sets of relationships, roles and permissions to define how they
want their information to be accessed. The central conceit is that
additional layers of information can be deployed to seal private
information.
I argue that such a model is not sustainable. It asks users to
trust services with even richer private information and
relationships (accounts, e-mail addresses, other personal
identifiers). These services are not only raising the cost of
private sharing but, in some cases, the extra data only creates new
vulnerabilities.
Where, then, does all this leave us? A new model is emerging:
Simple privacy. Ultimately a return to historical norms, it means
that less is more. Within this construct, people share only what
data they wish and with whom they wish. The simple-privacy model
minimizes the informational footprint needed to privately share
information and it doesn't require embedded accounts or any social
elements. The result is that privacy becomes heightened, and for a
very simple reason: It is impossible for a system to expose
maliciously or accidentally that which it does not know.
I predict that this model of private sharing will prevail again, as
it has in the past, and the period we're in now will eventually be
seen as a deviation from the historical norm—the one in which
privacy, if you can imagine, was a relatively simple thing to
maintain.
What do you think?
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