Six Sigma Privacy Standards, Part III
This is the third in a series on privacy. I believe that there’s no excuse for not taking the same rigid Six Sigma standards that Toyota uses and applying them to privacy breaches: a maximum permissible failure rate of 4 instances per 1,000,000 events.
Two days ago, I began the Six Sigma Privacy Series with a piece about user apathy. I made the point that most users just don’t care about privacy all that much. As of now, I haven’t gotten any comments on the piece. Perhaps my readers don’t care that the users don’t care. It’s a massive non-caring-fest, spiraling out of control. Help!
I’m not the only one talking about this—far from it. Charles Knight, blogging from Defrag in Denver, sums up Esther Dyson’s observations:
The problem: consumers don?t really know what?s going on with all of the data captured about them. Nobody really reads disclosure statements (do you?). In fact, she commented that when you see a disclosure in ALL CAPS ITS BECAUSE THEY KNOW ITS HARDER, NOT EASIER, TO READ, THAT?S WHY.
A lot of information is derived information, marketers trying to figure out what type of person you are by what you have done on line. But when companies start to sell that data, the consumer really loses touch with what is known about them, who knows it, and what the heck they?re doing with it. The argument here is that consumers should have the right to this profile of information that is being assembled about them.
As a former banker, this is what happen to credit reports. Banks were making important loan decisions based upon data that you might not have been aware of - and of course it might be wrong. Nowadays you can request a free report from Equifax, et al, dispute incorrect information, and so on. (You just can?t delete the bad stuff.)
On the one hand, you’ve got people who don’t understand the Internet who just aren’t informed about privacy issues. On the other hand, people who know a lot about the Internet are calling for better portability coupled with more secure authentication to equal maximum convenience. Tim O’Reilly had this to say about OpenSocial and Facebook:
They need to reframe the problem. What would it take for me, as a user, to “authenticate” information about me that appears elsewhere on the web (Brad Fitzpatrick’s original “elsewhere.im” idea, now embodied as the SixApart Relationship Update Stream), and for applications to be able to follow that authentication stream? What would it take for me, as a user, to have fine grained control over that authentication, so that some applications could see all of it, and some could see only a little? What kind of system would make it easy for me to manage the data that appears about me, to reduce duplication of effort, yet to give me a single credential that I could proffer as a proxy for “the real me”?
Tim’s right, of course, which brings me back to the comment I made in Part I of this series: The problem is that we?ve got companies compiling and distributing personal information who don?t always have our best interests at heart, who don?t have to follow any regulations for maintaining the integrity of their data, and who don?t always have the resources or expertise to secure the information.
Yesterday, I touched on the approach of big e-corporates to privacy—Google, Ask.com, Microsoft. I believe that privacy is important to these companies (I am an extreme idealist and a diehard believer in innocent-until-proven-guilty; as far as I’m concerned, Floyd Landis won the Tour de France fair and square). That being said, it doesn’t appear to be a core issue for them. The stance I’ve seen is a reactive, market-driven one: Google reducing expiry dates on cookies, for example. Meanwhile, my bloglines subscriptions are choked with stories of laptops being stolen, employees selling personal info, and hackers exposing entire databases to the World Wide Web.
Here’s what the global standard should be: Six Sigma Privacy. A permissible ‘failure rate’ (private data falling into the wrong hands) of 4 instances in every 1,000,000 events. You tell me it’s not possible? That, if we want Tim O’Reilly’s totally portable and granularly controllable authentication system, we’re going to pay a privacy price?
I don’t believe you.
Embrace the genius of the AND. Customer control AND privacy. Portable data AND privacy. Social networking AND privacy.
VortexDNA, for example, doesn’t store any individual search history at all. It doesn’t matter if someone hacks into our database, issues a subpoena, or steals a laptop. There’s nothing there to see.
The privacy problem isn’t that people know about you. It’s that, sometimes, it’s none of their business, and you should get to decide when your business is your business. Companies need to respect that.
Your thoughts?
