October's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
How much do you trust the government? Not just the current Government, but the machinery of the state in all its forms?
This question was prompted by hearing e-envoy Andrew Pinder give a keynote speech at the British Human Computer Interaction Group annual conference last month. In it he revealed that next year he wants to start looking at how the government can use CRM techniques to improve its knowledge of the people who are using its sites, and the way it provides information to the public.
The example he gave was that someone might be thinking of moving to get a new job, and might go to a number of government sites to find out information about schools, hospitals and so on in the area. By collecting that data the government could then email that person with further information, such as new schools opening.
Unsurprisingly, the response from privacy activists was hostile. Speaking to NMA, Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said he had no faith in the e-envoy's concern for privacy. But Pinder himself touched on the crucial issue in his speech. He told delegates that he thought people would be willing to share more information about themselves in order to receive more tailored services. In other words the price for improved service is not paid in money, it's paid in information.
The implications of this same trade are becoming apparent elsewhere. A recent report by think-tank Demos, Mobilisation, highlighted the enthusiasm with which many mobile users greeted the possibility of location-based services, and the concern that followed their realisation that in order to use these services, their network operators would have to know where they were at all times.
Of course this trade-off is not new. It forms the basis of the promise of online advertising, of delivering highly targeted messages to consumers, and was at the root of the EU's recent concerns about the use of cookies. It was also the basis of customer disquiet with Microsoft's Passport service. And it surfaced again in a story in NMA on 2 October about the use of third-party cookies by companies providing aggregated customer behaviour data to banks.
There seems to be two important elements to the rise of these privacy worries. The first is a question of realisation. In the case of both cookies and location-based services, people were trading information for service without realising it. The uproar happened when they became aware of what was going on. The second element concerns who is gathering the information. Internet users seem to have accepted cookies, because the fact that an individual site owner knows they are a repeat visitor seems acceptable. But when the data is being collected by a huge multinational across a number of sites, people are much more concerned. Hence my opening question.
There is no doubt that Andrew Pinder is right, and that interactive media provide the government with a fantastic opportunity to improve the targeting of its communications with its citizens, and to reduce the financial cost of those communications. But the crucial question will be what cost, in terms of lost privacy, with the public be prepared to pay for the improvement.
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/