Worcester polytechnic institute - School of Business

MIS 500: INNOVATING WITH INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Assignment 2 – Op-Ed writing. Week 10: Privacy & Safety

Title: Address your users’ concerns before giving them more relevant content

By Yousef Fadila

People want more relevant content and proper advertisements on the internet. For instance, I as

a man prefer to see an advertisement for a new men’s shaver rather than the women’s one. But

we also don’t want to be “chased”! The bad news is that we can’t have both. We can’t really

enjoy the personalized online experience unless we allow online websites, such as search

engines to track us and learn our interests from our activities. Thus, under these circumstances,

are internet’s users willing to compromise privacy for the personalized internet experience?

What should firms do to address users' concerns?

We are witnessing a change in the perception of privacy’s invasion over time. It seems people

start bearing some invasion to their privacy in exchange for remarkable benefits. For example, a

while ago, it was considered unacceptable to track people on public spaces using security

cameras but over time it became tolerable when the trade-off here is the benefit of the public.

According to this trend, we expect people to be more willing to compromise part of their privacy

when they realize the benefits they receive. The higher rate of conversation of personalized ads

proves that this is a win-win situation by matching the best product for the right consumer and

reduce irrelevant content. Being aware for these benefits is likely to lead to a decline in the

resistance of being tracked.

In addition, the benefits for consumers could be even beyond that. In fact, some consumers

become smarter and active on the system. Personally, when I want to buy something online, I

just search for it and never purchase it immediately, meanwhile, all the ads I see, whether on

social networks or on Google, would be related to my recent search, some of them offer huge

discounts for the exact product I was about to buy which I could miss if my search was not

tracked.

Nevertheless, this gain doesn’t give the firms the freedom of action with user’s data or an

unlimited license to track their online activities. As a matter of fact, users have shown worries

about the methods used by firms to provide relevant content, especially when they are unaware

what data is gathered. Recent researches show that these concerns may lead to resistance to

engage in custom ads. To avoid the risk of losing customers, firms should address these

concerns by having a more transparent and safe system and grant privacy’s control to users.

To have a transparent system, firms should be clear what activities are tracked, what data is

gathered, what part is shared with other parties, and more important, why they are collecting it!

In order to minimize users’ resistance, it is important for users to know how their data is used

and never being shocked what firms know about them. The more transparent the system, the

fewer worries users would have.

To provide a safe system, firms should invest in securing users’ data. but even if they implement

the highest data security standards, they still need to be prepared to the event of a data

leaks.Thus, they should avoid labeling all gathered data with personal identities. Neglecting this

could have deleterious consequences, as compromising any data with personal identities will

force firms to disclose that to the public which could highly damage the brand. For examples, In

the case of Target data breach in 2013, Analysts show a large decline in Target’s reputation for

a significant period of time following the breach. Minimizing the data labeled with personal

identity, or creating a digital identity for tracked activities could significantly reduce such risk.

Lastly, Firms should grant privacy’s control to users. This includes not only the ability to limit the

usage of their data but also to completely opt-out from any tracking activities. Giving such

control to users would likely mitigate their resistance to engage with ads and personalize

content.

To recap, for a better user’s internet personalized experience, firms should let users know why

they track them thus they will be aware of the benefits they gain by compromising their privacy

but also firms must act with users’ data with cautions by developing a transparent, safe and user

controlled system otherwise, they may face resistance among customers to engage in relevant

content or even damage their brand reputation.