Who cares about privacy?

Is privacy dead?

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems famously said “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” This raises some interesting questions: Are we at a stage where people have just gotten over it? Do your customers care about privacy? What about younger people and the ‘millennials’?

Nothing to hide

When asked, most of us would say that we have ‘nothing to hide’ generally meaning that we’re not engaged in anything illegal or unsavory. This, however, does not mean we’re comfortable making our personal information public. We all instinctively prefer to hide our emails, financial information, health information, location history, internet site visits, personal diaries and the list goes on. We hide our personal information for some very good reasons, some of which are listed below:

People draw suprising and often unfair conclusions

Seemingly innocent information, like the fact that you may be a parent, can have negative financial consequences. A study in the American Journal of Sociology ¹found that “by experimentally holding constant the qualifications and background experiences of a pair of fictitious job applicants and varying only their parental status, we found that evaluators rated mothers as less competent and committed to paid work than non-mothers, and consequently, discriminated against mothers when making hiring and salary decisions.”

A study at Ben-Gurion University, Israel ² “sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job openings …the almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women …evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason…”

Identity theft

According to the SA Banking Association ³ “Criminals can use Personal Information to assume your Identity and acquire retail or bank accounts, or even defraud your insurance, medical aid and UIF. In some instances, perpetrators go to your bank and make transactions on your accounts while impersonating you.”

“Figures released recently estimated that identity theft cost South Africa over R1-billion each year. ‘We are not in a position to peg an accurate value to these crimes in South Africa, however, we agree that the cost of identity theft and fraud to businesses and members of the public could certainly be at this level,’ said Carol McLoughlin, executive director of the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service.” ⁴

Customers care about their privacy

In a study ⁶ where customers were given the choice online, they were more likely to chose services that did not share their data. The study showed that consumers showed a Willingness To Pay (WTP) of up to $6.01 more for a similar service that did not share their usage and personal information.”Given that the highest priced service in our survey was $12.99, this WTP suggests that consumers care a great deal about privacy and would be willing to pay a substantial fee to avoid sharing their information with third parties.”

It follows that respect for privacy could be used as a competitive advantage and market differentiator.

Who cares about privacy?