
By Byron V. Acohido
When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg infamously declared that privacy “is no longer a social norm” in 2010, he was merely parroting a corporate imperative that Google had long since established.
That same year, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly admitted that Google’s privacy policy was to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Indeed, the privacy of any consumer who spends any time on the Internet is owned several times over by the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn and other media companies and cloud service providers.
Canada and Europe require corporations to give individuals the clear choice to “opt in” to any services that collect behavioral data useful for profiling an individual. But in the USA, America’s tech and media behemoths have established ground rules that essentially deprive consumers of long-held, hard-won notions of privacy shaped over two World Wars, namely the right to be left alone.
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For the most part, American consumers have meekly acquiesced. We’ve been trained to instantly acknowledge and accept privacy terms and conditions that would never fly anywhere else in the world; this is the price we’ve agreed to pay for access to “free” Internet-based services.
That said, the pendulum may slowly be swinging the other way. More than 80 percent of U.S. respondents surveyed by legal firm Morrison & Foerster said they decided not to make a purchase because of privacy concerns. Five years ago, that number was less than 50 percent. LastWatchdog asked Cisco’s Chief Privacy Officer, Michelle Dennedy, to put this nascent trend into a wider context.
LW: Most people agree to privacy terms without much hesitation. Why has this become so?
Dennedy: Convenience, speed, and the attitude of “what choice do I really have?” We tend to accept that agreeing to the terms is the de facto if we want to play in the real world.… more