Liberty & Choice, Individuality & Privacy

It has come to my notice that the new direction of business practices seems to be exposing a deeper transition within society. As marketing leans towards the individualising of products, it becomes increasingly necessary for these companies to collect a greater depth of information about its customers.

There has been divided opinion as to the merits of targeted internet marketing and the subversive methods of attaining the information necessary to carry out such campaigns.

"People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world."
(Zuckerberg, 2010)

"Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information."
(Opsahl, 2010)

There has also been much talk within care industries about the rise of personalised care, and the call for increasingly specialised responses to individual needs (Morton & Morgan, 2009).

So what does this mean for the public at large? Well, it is not the demonstrated practice of big business to hedge its bets in terms of services offered. This means that a trend towards personalised service could mean a drift towards further sanctioned intrusion into the privacy of consumers. This then raises some issues:

+ First, just how important is privacy within modern society? With the rise of social networking, enabling expressions of individuality has become a visible and profitable market. When the minutiae of the lives of users are volunteered to full public view by millions of users, is this shift towards full disclosure of the 'private' in the interests of a public that is becoming very aware of its own diverse and complex nature?

+ Secondly, considering the first point, are the liberty of privacy and the liberty of individuality incompatible? Is it possible for a market trend and growing social movement towards disclosure to live alongside privacy of the individual?

These thoughts present a bit of a conundrum to me as a believer in the liberty of the individual 'agent' in society. I also consider the likelihood that my attachment to personal privacy may well be the cultural hangover from previous generations, which is being superseded in society by the 'public' right to free information.

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References:
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+ Mark Zuckerberg's 'From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings';

+ Kurt Opsahl's 'Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline';

+ Tracy Morton & Maureen Morgan's 'Examining how personalised care planning can help patients with long term conditions';