The business model for social media platforms depends on user traffic. The more users that sign on and share, the more revenue these sites generate from advertising. As we’ve noted before, user information can be worth $50 to $5,000 per person each year to advertisers and market researchers. By this logic, anything that limits the volume of what users share is bad for business, while anything that encourages them to sign on and share more often is for the good.
Today, most social media users generally share only the safest and most generic content with their followers, while reserving personal or sensitive information for more private mediums like instant messaging, texting or email. After continued privacy violations and missteps by social media providers, users are wary of who really sees the comments they post, and the more tech-savvy users don’t want personal and private information to be aggregated and inappropriately redistributed.
This translates to lost opportunity for social media providers, in both the near- and long-term. In the near-term, concerns about privacy will lead users to occasionally tap other communications platforms, representing fewer hits on a social media site, lowering its aggregate traffic and reducing the site’s advertising value. Over the long-term, the issue of privacy will inhibit social media’s potential to become a more embedded and primary means of communication. Privacy and security are also barriers to heavier adoption of social media for business and commercial use, which, if addressed, could open an entirely new model for secure enterprise collaboration.
The lost opportunity hasn’t received the notice it deserves because use of social media sites has only continued to grow. Ironically, as use of these sites has grown, so has interest in top-down regulation of user privacy. This is already becoming evident in current efforts by the European Union to address privacy and operating rules for social media.
We’ve addressed the problems with top-down regulation of user privacy on social media elsewhere. Add to those arguments the issue that every user has their own view of what is private. What it amounts to is that, whether the catalyst is government or users, privacy concerns will almost certainly place limitations on the continued growth in value of social media sites.
What is needed is a bottom-up solution that allows users to take control of their own privacy independently of the social media companies. Wave Systems set out to address this need with its scrambls service, which helps individual users selectively protect the privacy of their social media posts at will, with a single solution that works across all the primary social media platforms. Scrambls doesn’t signify a new approach. We have all used VPNs and SSL over public networks to assure that the content we transmit remains private. We do not choose to do this for all communications, but it does offer protection where we need it—providing a clear sense of security for email and the more sensitive services we use.
Allowing individuals to scrambl content they think of as personal also reduces the chance that social media companies might leak aggregated data following some future modification to privacy policy. This not only protects users, it protects the social media providers themselves by dramatically reducing the potential liability and negative publicity that results from inadvertently sharing Personally Identifiable Information.
It is natural to want basic control over the data that represents me. Wave Systems has spent 20 years developing tools expressly designed to protect data for the enterprise. So, we are excited to bring that expertise to the realm of social media and individual users, who today resort to imposing their own creative “codes” to convey private data over social media: “Met our mutual friend for dinner last night;” or “Done with the meeting – I’ll call to tell you how it went;” or “LOL call me J I’ll text you the number.”
So what’s the value to social sites of all that additional shared data, if it’s not entirely written in clear text? It’s widely known that social media providers use the information provided by account holders to conduct data mining for targeted advertising. Firstly, however, scrambling only affects the text of a post, leaving user and location data available. Secondly, is the information that users are willing to share via scrambls, but not willing to share without, content that sites want to target a user for? If a user is scrambling information, it’s because it’s private—a health diagnosis to be seen by close family, for instance. Chances are, that user does not want to have ads related to their diagnosis confronting them every time they sign in.
Scrambls seeks to help streamline the sharing process without needing to navigate away from a user’s communication platform of choice. The more comfortable we can all be with our sharing, the more we will share, and that can only increase the global value of this new model of communication.