Are you aware of the 700+ decisions you make daily? Are you happier when you get to choose for yourself or when others do so? When faced with choosing to join the masses and adapt a newly released product, do you jump in and just get it or do you wait? Are you an early or late adopter?
Google’s recent announcement that it’s consolidating its privacy policies brings all these questions to the forefront.
In a thought provoking article, Sara Marie Watson inquires about our relationship with corporations such as Google:
We must each begin to test our thresholds for levels of exposure and begin to question the nature of our relationships with these companies. We must ask ourselves, at what point does Google know more about me than I’m comfortable with? And we must think about these questions not only based on companies’ postures today, but on their unpredictable potential use down the road.
It seems to me that she is asking us to be a bit of late adopters and consider the implications down the road before we choose to let a company make our decisions for us.
But, something doesn’t quite make sense in all of the back and forth going on right now about Google’s policies and it has to do with Choices.
In her TED presentation The Art of Choosing Sheena Iyengar raises very relevant points about the 700+ choices we make daily and the implications of “too-many-choices-of-the-same-things.”
Is Google private policy consolidation just a simple elimination of the dilemma we face when choosing how much of our digital life are we really willing to expose, thus answering Watson’s question right from the moment we agree with the single policy? Isn’t agreeing to a single privacy policy for dozens of products better than doing so individually? Have you even read any of them before using the product?
And yet, there is even a more interesting question, what about all those people who, for years, have been resisting the pull from their friends to completely entangle their real life with their digital ones? Those late adopters, as defined by the Diffussion of Innovations theory. Those people already followed Watson’s recommendation of thinking about these questions not only based on companies’ postures today, but on their unpredictable potential use down the road. What value do they bring to the marketplace when they choose to wait?
Great questions! I’m all for simplifying the privacy policy experience – that’s not the point I find fault with. It’s that that this is the result of a technical architecture shift that compiles all of our data, and so we need to think more about what Google products we’re comfortable using, since there are so many, all collecting and ultimately now compiling information about us. Simple, legible privacy polices are great. But here it’s indicative of a significant shift in Google’s treatment, understanding, and potential use of all the data across nearly all of it’s products.
Thank you Sara Marie, and your point came across loud and clear, which I was to thankful for when I found your article in The Atlantic. It, however, made me think about lots of related questions about your last point in your comment, which is the same thing I have heard (and even said myself) as a reason why many have not joined Facebook… the late adopters.