Common Folk Collective

In 1999 Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, infamously said “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” In 1999 I was riding the tech boom and working at a startup expecting to have champagne wishes and caviar dreams in the not to distant future. I was also a huge Sun fanboy, I made my living writing Java code on a Sun Sparc Station. Sun was the future of ubiquitous computing “write once, run everywhere” and “The Network is the Computer” were two of Sun’s mottos that I saw as THE FUTURE. When I read about this quote, I was furious, a lot of people were furious.

Now fast forward 13 years to 2012, your Gmail account is free because Google peeks at your messages to show ads that are relevant and even goes as far as suggesting whom else should be on your to line based on past email chains. Amazon suggests what items you should buy based on what you’ve looked at over the last couple of days. Every time you go to the grocery store and swipe your “customer loyalty card” they offer you coupons based on what you’ve bought in the past. In an extreme case a Target figured out a daughter was pregnant before her father knew. So I find it amazing that people still think they are anonymous on the on the internet.

The episode of Family Guy (“Ratings Guy“) shows how much privacy has been lost. The episode focuses on the Griffins becoming a Nielsen family, wherein their TV watching habits are monitored in an attempt to see what people are watching. This is where it struck me, rather than companies actively trying to figure out what consumers are seeking. The consumers are instead offering up the information readily. The Facebook like button has consumers giving out information that companies used to spend a lot of money to discover. What used to sought after is now being given away.