By Melody Mendoza
Blair Reeves, product leader of IBM Digital Analytics, doesn’t think so.
Even though the broadcasted message coming out of the privacy debate is that online users are concerned about privacy online, Reeves said the reality is actually that the public at large is not.
“That’s what’s misleading about the privacy argument,” Reeves said. “The data does not support the fact that everyone is concerned about privacy.”
Even so, this doesn’t mean privacy is not important, Reeves added.
As the product leader of IBM Digital Analytics, Reeves measures on-site behavior to see what customers are trying to do on a particular website and what services they’re interested in so his clients can personalize a message, offering or promotion based on what that customer is looking at.
This is where the privacy debate stems.
With information that IBM as well as Google and many others provide, companies can produce things like personalized advertisements on social media of a product or service that a consumer was just searching for on search engines, for example.
“The big difference is that Google is a free product,” Reeves said. “It has cool functionality but it’s limited because it’s free.”
Therefore, Reeves said privacy is an important topic to discuss because many consumers don’t understand what they’re data is being used for, and that’s a real concern.
For example, he said many people feel scandalized and get mad when they find out Google scans consumers’ gmail for words and phrases.
“A lot of people don’t understand that when you use a free service, you are the product,” he said. “Being mad about a free service is silly.”
In addition, he said there is confusion about what privacy really is.
“The problem is that privacy is in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “What does privacy mean? If it means something different to everyone then it doesn’t have meaning.”
So the question remains: Do consumers really care about online privacy? Do consumers care that companies like IBM, Google and many others are measuring their on-site behavior?
Once again, Reeves is going to the data.
All the evidence shows that consumers respond better to personalized marketing, Reeves said.
“If you ask people, they say, ‘I don’t want to see ads’… but evidence shows that consumers respond strongly to personalized marketing. Whether they like or not, they do respond to it.”
To get personalized advertisements, people hire companies like IBM or use Google Analytics to see what consumers are doing online.
“As long as it’s effective, marketers are going to use it,” Reeves added.
Privacy: What is it? Do consumers care? Should they?
That’s what Reeves wants to discuss at South by Southwest on March 8.
But more importantly, “I want to start conversation that is really lead by data; led by evidence,” Reeves said.
The narrative that many people hear today is about people who are concerned about privacy, “and yet people are giving away information for free more than ever,” he said, adding that more and more people are signing onto Facebook and using Google and Twitter.
It makes more people assume that the small vocal minority that is really concerned about privacy is reflective of the public at large, but they’re not, Reeves said.
To be effective, Reeves said consumer data should be used to determine what privacy policies and regulations need to be in the future.
“There needs to be some sort of regulation,” he said, “but it can’t be based upon a 19th century version or theory of privacy.”