Wouldn’t you consider it an invasion of your privacy if marketers could rummage through your closet to check your brand preferences? What if potential employers could disguise themselves and enter your social life in order to evaluate you for a job?
These things can’t happen, of course. We live secure in the knowledge that they are against the law.
Now consider Gen Y, whose members live in an open environment, and embrace social networking that breaks through the divide between their online and offline worlds. Their Facebook pages are a natural extension of their social lives, and they feel secure in the knowledge that they hold the keys to their personal spaces. As long as they play by the rules, they can choose whom to invite and whom to exclude.
Then, the rules are altered. Social network operators begin unlocking the doors to people’s personal worlds. The recentdebate about Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg; frequent changes in privacy settings in social media are resulting in an entire generation becoming increasingly wary and guarded about their private lives.
Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are, in general, willing to share intimate details of their private lives with an online audience. However, recent research by the Pew Internet Project found that although 75% of Millennials in the US have a profile on a social network, most place boundaries on it. In fact, the study found that members of Gen Y were more likely to monitor privacy settings than are older people, and more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they can’t be identified. In another survey by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, 88% of a sample of Gen Y-ers voiced support for a law that would require websites to delete captured information. Sixty-two percent of them wanted the right to know everything a website knows about them.
Operators of social networks argue that relatively loose privacy restrictions improve the user experience and allow customization of the platform for each user. For instance, they can track likes and dislikes to provide each person with more relevant information. But isn’t this a kind of cyber-stalking?
It’s common knowledge that HR professionals take advantage of lax privacy settings to screen candidates based on their Facebook content. A Melbourne-based recruitment consultant believes that the practice of winnowing candidates based on personal information online is little different from excluding someone because of gender, sexual preference, marital status, or age. In a recent comment on an article in The New York Times, “Neville J.” called on legislators to outlaw the practice. Judging by the large number of endorsements he received, many others share his sense of alarm.
Look at the broader issue. I believe that collaboration through social networks is an important way of building trust. Trust is built on transparency. If you are in the business of enabling collaboration through social networks, you have to demonstrate that you can be trusted. So, I ask, can you afford to change the rules midway? Or do frequent changes corrode the very foundations of trust?
Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/06/do-you-trust-your-social-netwo.html
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This is a very relevant post especially with all the controversy on privacy settings on Facebook.
My take on changing rules midway is that it will corrode the trust built upon the original proposition. Agreed that Monetization is very important for any enterprise to sustain itself but it can’t be at the cost of alienating the users who enable monetization in the first place.
What is most disturbing is not giving proper communication of these changes in privacy setting users stand to lose. already one can easily find stories of employees sacked because of stray comments in the social media… Would they have done so had they been aware of the changes?
i came across this interesting info-graphic some time back on the scale down of privacy on facebook—http://bit.ly/bSKEmx
@Hiranya
Agree with your points. These changes will alter user behavior. While a lot of people may point out that the growth of the network does not seem to have stopped, but it would be interesting to know if the level of sharing of information, photographs, adding of applications etc has changed or not.
The issue though does not stop at Social Networks alone, how do traditional companies mashup and make use of this customer data. It is not just an issue of privacy alone but is more of an issue of company practices and its use of big data internally and with their partners.
Resistance to such practices is likely to increase . I did write a quick note on this aspect http://futurechat.in/faceborg-you-will-be-resisted/
Collaborative efforts will bear fruit if there is basic trust in the organisation and this can only be demonstrated by behavior and practices.