Privacy Ethics: Why Companies Must Respect Your Data | Kirsten Martin

[00:00:03][Music] [Applause] so a few months ago we had in what my house counts as a minor crisis my tall 17-year-old son had actually outgrown his bed his feet were hanging off of The Edge and so I being a dutiful parent went online and started looking up different mattresses that both could fit his frame and then fit into his bedroom and in the end we decided that he should just muddle through the next year until he goes to college and we told him to sleep diagonally across his bed until then thank you I wasn't expecting a clap for that but I'll take it but that didn't stop the ads over the next few weeks every time I went on a news article on my phone I realized I kept seeing the same ads kind of following me around reminding me of my decision to make a muddle through the next year and we've all encountered this we go online we look up something that we need or we're concerned about or someplace that we need to go and somehow or another that information shows up in an ad and in many ways this is part of our bargain and going online we see ads sometimes slightly personalized and exchange we get cheaper if not free content but that's not all the information that they're getting they might know your location information who your contacts are your Facebook friends they might grab your text messages or emails and this information can then be used perhaps when you apply for a job later on or determine insurance and the type of insurance that you get and it's the secondary use of information outside of any bargain that we struck that really causes consumers concern when they go and fill out surveys but business has an answer this is a brand new business model this free flow of information is necessary for market efficiency and oh by the way they claim consumers aren't really that concerned because we keep going online and downloading apps and I have to admit when I hear this I have a tendency to just tune it out like white noise I almost don't even hear it because when I as a professor of business ethics when I'm doing my research on privacy online I offer different scenarios about how information is both gathered and then used and consumers consistently say this does not meet their privacy expectations and is a breach of trust so what's going on business is telling us this is a Brave New World that everything is different now and consumers look out into the cloud out into the abyss not knowing what's going on but just knowing that we don't like it so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to reaffirm our instincts when it comes to privacy online and I'm going to argue that much of what we need to know about privacy we actually learned in middle school and finally that we need to demand more out of business when it comes to respecting our privacy so let's go back to what for many of us was an unfortunate time in our life Middle School so every every day in Middle School you had some new nugget of information who you like who you don't like who your crushes whether you like your parents whether or not you're going to tell your parents you don't like them or not you go to school you share that information with a friend that you trust but because this is Middle School somehow that information comes back to you by way of a gossip and that gossip shares information when you would not when you're talking to a new friend or talking to that crush or about to take a test the gossip shares information when it's not in your interest and this is actually what makes them a gossip and not a friend so we had two characters we worried about in middle school first was that trusted Confidant that actually shared the information but second we worried about the gossip using information when it's not in our interest but there was a third character we worried about in middle school and that's the eavesdropper someone who listened in when they weren't invited if you were like me that oh God is me in middle school that's nice you had two younger brothers lurking around the house listening in to every one of my conversations oh they're adorable aren't they that just it only let them get away with things for way too long so they they would listen into any of my conversations definitely when they weren invited they pick up the phone extension when they had when we had phone extensions and they would listen into all my conversations so this was the third type of character that we had to worry about in middle school first was that trust Tred Confidant that actually somehow shared the information second was the gossip who gathered up the information but then uses it when it's not in your interest and third are these EES droppers who were listening in and trying to listen in on conversations when they weren't invited I'm not going out in a limb when I say that middle school was less than ideal and we always strive for more than middle school and it's worth considering an example where we didn't have to deal with these types of characters when we were sharing information and the Three Musketeers as a classic book about good friends and trusted confidants and the protagonist of the story dartanion is not a friend he is he is a friend he's not a musketeer and he asks one of the Musketeers when he finds out that he's of royalty do the other two know that you're a royalty and AOS says no they don't I wanted them to see me and not my title and he said please don't say anything and dark tagnon says of course not it's not my story to tell consider how different that is from what we experienced in middle school it's not my story to tell here we have a situation where information is shared and yet protected it's shared with one but not everyone and this isn't a novel or a new idea this book was written in 1844 and it's set in the 1600s and so the Three Musketeers in many ways offers a counter example to what we had to experience in middle school and in Three Musketeers we have information shared yet protected from gossips and eavesdroppers so let's go online and see where we are when we go online we share information about who we like and what we like what we're worried about what our concerns are where we need to go in the future travel plans that we might have whether we need a mattress we share that information with a website or an app that we trust and that information gets shared sometimes by the website or the app but many times we have trackers Eaves dropping on us this purple box highlights the 39 trackers on this website it knows how I got to this website where I go next it knows what I read on the website where I click through what I'm looking at the Search terms I put in and it's not particular to any one website here's another website with 20 trackers same same type of trackers they're called beacons or web beacons cookies or super cookies these are the equivalent of my two younger brothers listening in when I was in Middle School only now there are 39 of them following me around online but these trackers actually share information they sell to what you might have heard of as data aggregators or data Brokers and these data aggregators and data Brokers actually pull together little bits and pieces of information from across different websites from across different apps they might grab your location data they might grab your grocery store purchases from offline and when they kind of pull all this stuff together it paints a very robust picture of who we are it tells our story and so here's an example here's my story from just two days in October this is not from from a data aggregator this is from just the key words in my web history and you can tell quite a bit about me from just two days though the biggest word is teenagers I have three teenagers that are like this three teenagers in my house right now and I they generate a lot of concerns for me online they look them up a lot you'll also see coffee not coincidence and then yoga is in there you can see I looked up information about the tech rehearsal from the Ted talk there was a swarm of bees in a public school near me so this story is then used to gossip about us it's sold to companies and used when it's not in our interest it's used to sort us to categorize us to Market to us to advertise to us it might be used to guess whether you're a depressed teenage girl open to certain types of advertising are you in economic distress and a good Target for credit card ads or for-profit college ads have you been looking at medical symptoms and can they offer you a cure these are not our idle kind of neighborhood Middle School gossips these are professional gossips they are selling this information to law enforcement companies that want a product Market to us to Future employers to politicians that want your vote so we have the same characters we dealt with in middle school we had this trusted app or trusted website that we initially shared the information with we had those trackers in the purple box Eaves dropping listening in when they're not not invited and here we have a gossip the data aggregator using information when it's not in our interest it's worth remembering why our parents warned us about the dangers of middle school and why Scholars from law Scholars to philosophers to computer scientists warn us about privacy online right now and this is because privacy is best understood as our ability to both share information while having it protected we share information knowing who's going to get that information and how it's going to be us used this is important because we need to share information with people that we trust both like Athos worried about his royalty status being too loud of a signal for friends but also we need to trust the other party not to use that information to harm us to manipulate us or make us vulnerable and this is important because sharing information is actually key to developing who we are it's how we process events we talk through them it's how we develop different types of relationships form groups and social bonds it's how we develop a sense of autonomy if the opposite were the case if the only way to protect our information to was withhold it keep it away from society this in many ways goes against our instincts in being social and is actually one of the worst punishments we can devise is to force someone to withdraw from society or even worse to kind of go into solitary so you can see we have this tension we have these reasonable expectations to know how information is being gathered and used and that we have a business model that assumes that that we don't care the market approach since I'm from a business school is to stop feeding the gossips this is the same advice your parents probably gave you in middle school so if we go back to that website that I showed you earlier if I actually turn on the blocker this is actually a product called ghoster as in witches and ghost ghoster there are many other blockers out there that you can they're free I can well I can make my brothers go away but I can I make the ad go away but more importantly I actually make the number of trackers get smaller and then the ones that are there are all grayed out meaning they're being blocked so I'm blocking the EES droppers from listening in now second we can actually withhold our business from companies that we find to be untrustworthy and this actually works in 2016 a number of websites tried to force users like myself to turn off these products these blockers and enough people turned around and walked away that the websites had to reverse their policy so with withholding our business from companies we find untrustworthy works in the long run but those gossips are tough because we don't have a relationship with the data aggregator so it's hard for us to pull our information back but I'm going to say two things that should give us some hope first they don't admit this but companies know that trust is necessary for sharing information they know this because companies themselves develop relationships like joint ventures and alliances and Partnerships and they spend a ton of time and money doing it that allows them them to share information like their forecasts what they need in the future what their concerns are what there's going on in their business this trust is necessary to protect that type of information because this is key that type of information can be used to make to manipulate them to make them vulnerable in the marketplace so this argument that the free flow of information is necessary for market efficiency is an argument business only uses for Consumer data this is not an argument they use for themselves so we need to put that argument into context and I I just mean ignore it we should just ignore when they say that second we've actually heard many of these arguments before we as Society call out bad behavior and business's first response is no no no this is necessary for our business model we hear this right now all the time with privacy and we actually heard it decades ago with pollution so when the Environmental Protection Agency was first started in 1970 it was called the worst enemy of business the Clean Air and the clean water act were called unreasonable and unrealistic any attempt at Tech uh regulating pollution was considered technically impossible and would cause business to lose hundreds if not thousands of jobs they said so how is that River on fire hopeful while those same companies that were actually in denial about the role with pollution eventually became compliant with the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act and the best started using sustainability as a source of innovation and a competitive advantage so we need to see these initial arguments that business is making as just the process by which they reconcile their current practices with the social norms and values that we espouse so the companies that are in denial about their role with privacy eventually will become respectful and compliant with our privacy expectations and the best will actually use privacy as a source of innovation and a competitive Advantage so our role in making that hope I just described a reality that cloud we look out into that Abyss is actually made up of very distinct characters we need to identify the trusted confidants we need to identify the eavesdroppers those trackers and we need to identify the gossips the data aggregators this allows us to use different tactics for each and it really lets us focus in on those data aggregators gossiping about us and using our information when it's not in our interest we have reasonable expectations to know how information is both gathered and used this allows us to develop as individual ual and develop relationships we need to demand more out of companies to respect those expectations rather than undermine them we should reward companies that are trustworthy and we need to block those who are not and finally our response our response when we hear about companies who want to Eaves drop on us and gossip about us our response needs to be that's not your story to tell thank you very much