Privacy as a Social Differentiator

Wilson suggests that while large companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo could set a precedence for privacy, from an infrastructural outlook it is harder for them to roll back and scale permissions to their huge social graphs.

He says, "The challenge for large social networks is to undo permissions that they've already given. Meanwhile, a startup is at an advantage as they can build something from scratch that allows the user to predefine the data terms for sharing."

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick has criticized a number of Facebook's privacy policy decisions, and Wilson echos this need for user education and control.

"When you reveal your specific location, it's very important that you have control over that... There are business opportunities in privacy-related services," Wilson says. "The challenge is to get someone [whether business or consumer] to pay $2-$10 dollars per month to ensure that sort of premium privacy."

(i) There is an increasing opportunity to use privacy as a differentiator vs the existing SocNets - my own view is stronger than Fred's in that I think there will be a large backlash against the current privacy scrapers. You won't see it in massive user turnoff, more just the slow reduction in activity and people who still "live" on that site until it becomes an online Ghost Town.

(ii) Privacy potentially has a business model of its own, called pay-conomics - but how to get most people to pay $24 - $120 per annum is not easy. I thus suspect these services will have to offer more than simple social connectivity. Clearly location based gaming is one extra suit, but (in my view anyway) its possibly a fad, or (more likely) a feature that will be integrated into more comprehensve services.

(iii) Who will use Premium Privacy? In my view it will be the same outcome as Free to Air (Ad supported) TV - ie the people with money will opt for a No Ads / No Scrape service (thus removing the most valuable people the Ads / Scrapers want to target) while the remaining 80% get left to the mercy of crappy "Free to Scrape" SocNet services.