Location Based Privacy vs User Experience Ease

Amidst news that Foursquare is growing like Topsy, (I don't get it - clunky UI, minimal user benefits, but hey...) interesting thoughts re the tradeoff of User Experience vs Privacy.....Venture Blog's David Hornik:

Over the last few weeks I've started to suffer from Four Square fatigue. After all, Four Square is a lot of work. To get the benefits of Four Square, you need to proactively check in wherever you go. And, while each checkin requires a relatively small amount of work, in the aggregate, it takes real effort to make the most of the Four Square experience.

Which leads to this interesting thought:

Would it be better if Four Square just checked you in automatically any time you lingered at a location for more than 15 or 20 minutes? Or does that cross the privacy line for most of us?

The challenges of Four Square have gotten me thinking more broadly about privacy on the web. On the one hand, the less proactive input a service requires, the less friction there is in maintaining its usefulness. Automatic Four Square naturally will produce more data, on average, than does a Four Square that requires proactive behavior. And, for many, the Four Square experience would be greatly enhanced. On the other hand, when data is being passively collected by a service, there are natural privacy concerns that come with that data collection. How many of us want our every daily stop published to the Web? So perhaps automatic Four Square would turn away more users than it would attract.

This maps to some research we did last year on location privacy (see chart above). In a nutshell, the best interests of the user are not aligned to the best interests of teh service provider and thus we can predict an assault on user privacy - game based LBS services being one of the most effective ways (see our original discussion here). Now, the VentureBlog author isn't worried:

We have all seen that consumers are willing -- often times happy -- to trade privacy for utility. I know that I am. And, while Mark Zuckerburg's statement that privacy is a generational concern was controversial, I think he is absolutely right about that. The coming generations of consumers may not abandon the idea of privacy in its entirety, but they will certainly have very different views of the appropriate balance between privacy and utility. That balance has already clearly shifted in the direction of utility and I believe the trend will continue.

To some this will be viewed as a warning -- a cry of the coming privacy apocalypse. I don't see it that way. As technologies and standards evolve, doors open to new products and services. We are on the verge of an explosion of new ideas.
Automatic Four Square and its progeny are coming. And I, for one, am excited about that.

This Brave New Worldview is very naive, and possibly even irresponsible as worse still it plays into the hands of those who wish to control by monitoring or who wish to use these systems illegally/criminally. As Bruce Shneier has pointed out, the huge privacy defects in Social Media systems guarantee a requirement for strong privacy and anonymity.

We await the first cases of serious LBS privacy abuse in 2010, and the inevitable outcry will make the Phorm brouhaha look like a Phunfair