Obsession with data and privacy
By: Julia Romanenkova
Tags: Data, Product Management, Data Science, Privacy, User Research

Obsession with data and privacy

After the Privacy Shield for data sharing was struck down lately, there has been another wave of discussions, strong opinions and updated policies on the topic.

Each year we generate and collect more and more data about ourselves, and we learn how to store and process it. And processing is the key here, as the ability to quickly make sense of data is the rationale for collecting it in the first place. 50 years ago we had lots of data too, but we couldn’t do much about it. E.g., border control officers register everyone who enters the country and in 2020 you can easily tell what’s the average age of the entrant and how many men named “Mike” enter the country monthly. But in 1970, getting such an insight would have required dozens of man-hours. And even now we don’t have the capacity yet to process and make sense of all the data we collect. E.g., there are security cameras everywhere and oftentimes people watch the recording only when an incident occurs. But there are many more data dimensions in those recordings, like traffic or demographic patterns that we’ll eventually use to optimize our lives.

We are getting better and better at storing and processing data, and people get worried that

their personal information is now available to hundreds of organizations;

these organizations could use this data improperly.

Does it mean that we should stop collecting it?

I have mixed feelings about obsession with data privacy and I’ve been on both sides of the problem. As a person, I don’t want a third party to know that me, who lives there, buys this set of products each Wednesday and spends 2 hours weekly talking to this phone number. And I don’t want to be bombarded by some irrelevant fashion ads because a marketer decided that females of my age are their target audience. And as a product manager, I want to collect data about how customers interact with the product. It helps to understand if my product solves their problems good enough, which issues customers have with the product and how else I can make their life easier. There are a lot of customer beneficial decisions that are made based on the collected statistics.

Currently, data collecting solutions have limitations on the kind of data you can gather, they depersonalize the data, limit the ways you can process and use it, and control and limit access to the data by third-parties. Numerous data privacy policies are created and updated daily.

I think eventually we’ll reach equilibrium and make “stalking” impossible, but will take advantage of the information that we can collect and process. At the moment there are some questionable practices that neither protect personal information nor help to get useful insights. For example:

1) Blocking tracking pixels in the emails

When you see these statistics as a sender, you get pure numbers: 30% read your email, 1% mark it as spam, 25% view email in Apple Mail, 20% open it with the mobile device, etc. And, as a business, if I see that nobody opens my emails, it’s a good reason to make them more useful to the readers or to stop sending them at all. And if I see that 60% read emails from a mobile device, I’ll double-check that the layout is adapted well for those devices.

So what kind of protection does blocking of pixels bring? I think it satisfies our emotional need to have private space, but does not secure our sensitive info from leaking out. The real problem here is non-professional marketers who keep spamming you with low-quality content. And if you block them from gathering the statistics, they won’t have a chance to retrospect on their performance and will continue doing a lousy job.

And same with the websites. Fun fact, the article that compares tracking pixels to malware has a built-in pixel itself. So they know the value of data, even if they are against “spying”. I think it’s time to admit that it’s an industry standard for any business to collect data about their customers, and not their evil plan.

2) Privacy-friendly tools

FireFox since version 69 blocks many trackers by default, including ones that don’t collect private data and have nothing to do with marketing. The company has the technical possibility to block the data collectors, and they do it, although in many cases it does not protect a user from their privacy being violated because there was no such intent.

The other side of the medal is that the tracking tools solve users’ problems too. E.g., we learn what are the most popular screen resolutions and optimize our design for them. Or by studying the screen recordings we learn which parts of the app frustrate people most and we fix that. Or we learn which our articles people love and which they don’t, and we create better content. And if you block all the trackers, we don’t have your “vote” anymore. I don’t know how I can fix the problems that FireFox users have with my product because these users are invisible to me.

3) Cookie awareness

The attempts to make the cookie policies transparent have gone too far. The “I agree” bars take up to half of the screen and overwhelm you with the options to choose from. I think this UX will evolve soon because it decreases usability. We usually want to find some information on a website quickly, without any distractions, and the necessity to hustle through the questions contradicts our intent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m against companies sharing my private information, like my pharmacy shopping list with my name on it. But I’m okay if a business knows that females in their 30s prefer this lotion, it means they’ll know their audience and have stock for it. I care about ad preferences in my social accounts and I’m truly annoyed when marketers show me the ads that they think are relevant. When I’m offered the things I don’t need, this is a lose-lose. Marketing spends resources collecting data, paying for the ads and then shows you irrelevant products. You feel annoyed and think that your privacy is invaded. But if they show me something relevant that will help me solve my problems, it’s a win-win.

It’s clear that having data is power and that some people can manipulate it not with the best intentions. And I know that many engineers are against the tracking scripts because they understand how much data is out there. But for an average company the real challenge is to analyze the data properly and understand what conclusions to make from the data they have.

End-users and data analysts perceive data differently

To sum it up, I believe that:

We will collect more and more data in the future, nothing will stop it.

The ways to get more useful insights from all the informational noise will evolve.

There will be people who’ll use the data unethically, e.g. for profiling and modeling to pursue their own needs. In this case it doesn’t matter if they have exactly your data or not, you’ll be the victim anyway. This should be punished by law.

People will continue to steal data, the storages will never be 100% secure. Also we can’t do anything about social engineering.

If your online activity becomes invisible it means that the average user portrait will be biased and based on the incomplete data. E.g. a publisher posts two articles, one on the breakthrough in technology, another on the new cat fashion. Out of 100 users who read the publisher 40% read the article on the tech, and 60% read the article on the cats. Out of 40% of tech lovers 35% had tracking disabled. The publisher sees that only 7% were interested in the tech article and stops posting on this topic.

Bad marketers are a problem, but we’re also getting better at this. There are less annoying ads, better content and the suggestions you see become more and more relevant.