The growth of social media platforms, and particularly their seeming indispensability to the lives of the digital natives, is often used as evidence of the death of both the desire for privacy and its attendant social relevance.
In a post-Facebook world, aren’t privacy worries increasingly confined to the old folks’ home and a few wonks? Nobody reads privacy policies, so nobody cares. QED.
Europe’s data privacy rules are about to be updated for the social media age. A lot of effort over many years has gone into re-writing them. Some say they will become too restrictive, others not protective enough of consumers’ interests, but all agree they will include the potential for massively increased fines for non-compliance. But why go to all that effort if nobody really cares any more?
The Samaritans app caused controversy among Twitter users over privacy concerns and was quickly withdrawn.
In October 2014, the highly respected Samaritans, a charity trying to stop vulnerable people from hurting and killing themselves, released the Samaritans Radar app with no small amount of fanfare. Anyone worried about a friend could sign up to get an alert if they posted something on Twitter that the Radar algorithm interpreted as a need for help. Sounds great doesn’t it? The Samaritans were very proud, taking the public data of tweets and putting it to good use to look out for vulnerable people.
There was an immediate outcry from privacy experts, the app was taken down within a few days under public pressure, and was also investigated by the UK data protection regulator, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).
Why? All they wanted to do was to use publicly available information to help people help friends they might be concerned about.
The problem was a failure to look at the full picture. The app was making judgements about the mental health of people without their knowledge and sharing it with a third party. Anyone could get this analysis on anyone else, regardless of their actual motives and relationship with the person concerned.
The app was withdrawn before a full investigation could take place, not because of the risk of enforcement, but the much bigger potential risk to reputation, which might have undermined the trust the Samaritans rely on to do their very valuable and important work. However, the ICO still concluded that the app “did risk causing distress to individuals and was unlikely to be compliant with the DPA” [The UK Data Protection Act].
This extreme example highlights some important issues. Data privacy laws are complex and, though they may fail to keep up with changes in technology, there are some underlying principles that reflect long established social norms and cultural expectations. Practices may change quickly on the surface, but deep seated values shift much more slowly.
The world of social media sits at the fulcrum of the balance between the private and the public. This means that having a sophisticated understanding of what is both legal and acceptable is vital to the success of social platforms.
People don’t read privacy policies because they rely on trust much more than terms and conditions. Established privacy principles and laws play a vital role in building and maintaining that trust. However, trust can be lost very quickly, at a cost much higher than any regulatory fine, if the platform is perceived to have breached it.
Social platforms should pay attention to data privacy laws not just to avoid enforcement, but because they say something very important about culture and expectations. They might be able to ignore the some of the rules some of the time and get away with it for a while, but in the long term my bet is that faced with a choice between privacy and any individual platform, privacy will win out.
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Richard Beaumont CIPM is privacy services manager at Governor Technology.
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