Seth Godin?s a very smart guy.
He introduced the concept of permission marketing.
He?s also written a slew of business and marketing bestsellers, and has one of the foremost blogs on marketing today (also my favourite marketing blog).
Basically, Seth?s usually bang on the money and that?s why people listen when he speaks.
But for me, his blog post today about whether we care about privacy or not (and his example of Facebook to make the point) is off the mark, for one simple reason.
Facebook uses the practice of opt-out privacy, while every other reputable business offers the option of opt-in.
When you sign up for a newsletter, or a blog, or a marketing database, it?s because you?ve opted in. You ask to be informed of something.
You ask to be involved.
If your information is used by that resource, it?s because you allowed this in your privacy settings.
When Facebook makes changes to its platform, it invariably does so by resetting all the privacy settings back to the equivalent of you being visible to the whole world.
If you want to be private again, you have to go back into your settings and make the relevant changes.
Go to Google and search for ?Facebook privacy issues? and you get more than 300 million results. Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of the main concerns with Facebook since 2007.
Seth?s right in that often we don?t take enough care to look at what we?re signing up to. But that?s usually because we have to sign up to get into something.
Signing up to get out of something is a different thing altogether. And people do care about that, even when Facebook doesn?t seem to.
Image: think isb