The End of Privacy

I was walking through the waiting room at the place where I work and I happened to notice an article on the front page of Time Magazine. The title was "Everything About You is Being Tracked." This theme is nothing new. Journalists are always coming out with new insights into how large corporations are collecting data in order to exploit consumers. What really caught my attention, though, was the subtitle. Just under, "Everything About You is Being Tracked," the cover read, "Get Over It!"

I could not agree with this sentiment more. Many of us want to reap the benefits of living in a modern, technologically advanced world, but we don't want anyone to know anything about us. We want to earn points on our rewards card to get discounts, but we don't want the grocery store to know what we're buying. We want to have free reign of the world wide web, but we treat it as if it is our own backyard and no one should be able to see how we are browsing. We can't live without Facebook, but the tailored advertising on the sidebar appalls us.

We can't have our cake and eat it too, at least not in the way we think. If we want to experience the joys of living in the contemporary social world, we have to sacrifice a little of our privacy. Period. The only way to escape our preferences being tracked is to leave no footprint. Frankly, I'm baffled as to why anyone would be suprised that businesses are tracking consumer behavior. That is their job. A business is at a standstill if it doesn't know what its customers are buying. To tell a company that it cannot track customers is like telling a doctor that he cannot listen to a heartbeat or a police officer that he cannot dust for prints. If a company cannot track its customers, it cannot adequately perform its social function of providing meaningful products and services for consumption.

Being tracked is good for us. As consumers, we should want companies to know our buying preferences. I think we have this paranoid notion that businesses are out to take advantage of us and, if they have more information on us, they will be able to sell us stuff we don't want. The truth is, businesses aren't out to destroy consumers. Businesses need consumers. When they track consumer behavior, it always benefits the consumer. No company in its right mind wants to sell something to a customer that the customer doesn't want. When companies track our market behavior, they are not like the police officer tracking our prints so that he can catch us and imprison us. Rather, they are like the doctor listening to our heartbeat so that he can prescribe the appropriate medication.

Still, many of us feel like we've been compromised. A line has been crossed. We feel violated. We don't trust marketers. Perhaps that is why they are so secretive about how they collect our information. And then that secrecy breeds more distrust. It's a vicious cycle. Nevertheless, it will go on. We will spend money and companies will watch our every move. Privacy is dead. Welcome to the brave new world.