Do People Care About Privacy? - AVC

If we do care about privacy as a collective value, then it cannot be an individual burden. Right now, privacy is essentially a luxury good. If you can afford not to use coupons, you don’t have to let retailers track your shopping habits with loyalty points. If you’re technically savvy, you don’t have to let Gmail see all your emails.

And in general, the average user is now starting to actually care about things like privacy, data custody, and data ownership, which poses a real political threat to Big Tech.

Big Tech and even legacy enterprises are becoming saddled with privacy debt.

While many tech companies were architected to collect data, they were not necessarily architected to safely store data. Today there’s not just a rift, but a chasm between where data privacy technology, processes, and regulations should be and where they are, thus creating massive amounts of “privacy debt.”

While your friends may occasionally react to a Huff Post article about Big Tech encroaching on personal privacy with an angry emoji, most users are compelled by convenience, not privacy.

Privacy tech is hot, but it’s unclear what consumers’ willingness to pay or care is. Right now, companies make money and scale faster delivering enterprise solutions. GDPR and CCPA compliance is top of mind, along with the desire to mitigate legal risk. Some products in the space sit as wrappers or analytics layers on existing data assets — BigID o... See more

Privacy might be the digital spinach: something you know that’s good for you, beloved by regulators, but not a primary driver for anyone but the most extreme health consumers.