by Paul Jacobson (@pauljacobson) Our insistence on having access to free services such as Facebook or Twitter both heralds the death of the open web and, at the same time, has given rise to most of the online privacy-related controversies in recent years.
Have to make money
The problem with free services is that they have to make money in some way or another and the way that they generally do this is through advertising, which leverages our personal information in order to give some kind of value to their advertisers.
We agree to this when we sign up for these services. The extent of our agreement is documented in privacy policies which few people read and truly consider.
What this means is that we are essentially trading information about ourselves for access to these services which, admittedly, we do see value in, otherwise we wouldn’t use them quite so much.
Often takes a back seat
What happens in the meantime is that these free services find themselves having to extract more and more value from us, using our personal information through tailoring their infrastructure to take more advantage of our preferences, relationships and data. What this means for consumers is that the respect for consumer privacy often takes a back seat to extracting more value from advertising revenue.
Public pressure on these free services, typically reputational harm, is what keeps them relatively honest and often attracts regulatory oversight in the interests of preserving consumers’ rights and protecting their privacy.
Despite this, most of the privacy controversies on the social web emerge from the intersection of a need to establish a sustainable and profitable revenue model while, at the same time, maintaining some degree of respect for consumers’ privacy rights in order to secure users’ trust in these services.
Particularly vocal
Google has been particularly vocal about the importance it places on users’ trust as an incentive to “do no evil”.
An emerging trend is that social services are becoming more closed and are limiting interoperability with other services. The idea is to ensure that users spend more and more of their time in investing more and more of themselves in these services to maximise value.
A consequence of this is markedly less emphasis on open standards supporting an open, interoperable web and that, on the whole, is enormously detrimental to this idea of an open web, where people can engage with each other across multiple platforms and services.
Happening again
One area where we are seeing this happening again is in the instant messaging or chat space, which has seen a resurgence of interest, likely because this is where younger users seem to be heading as the platform for their preferred social experience.
Facebook and Google have developed mobile messaging services (Messenger and Hangouts, respectively), partly to compete with enormously popular mobile-based messaging services such as WhatsApp and, more recently, WeChat. Unfortunately, these services are largely neither compatible nor interoperable with each other.
What is happening with these chat/messaging services echoes what happened originally with email services in the distant prehistory of the internet. Back then, if you were using one email provider, you typically couldn’t send an email to a user using another email provider because each email service ran on proprietary and incompatible platforms.
Enormously enhanced
This eventually changed with the adoption of open standards facilitating the distribution of email across different service providers and enormously enhanced the value of the email as a primary communication method upon which we all rely today.
Despite open messaging protocols such as XMPP (formerly Jabber), which enable providers to create interoperable messaging products, the current generation of messaging services are following defunct proprietary models that once crippled email.
Even Google, which baked XMPP into its Google Talk service, has abandoned XMPP in favour of its proprietary Hangouts service that has replaced Google Talk as Google’s primary chat service.
Facebook’s Messenger, at one point, supported XMPP (and may still do so) but Facebook’s emphasis (as with Google, Apple, WhatsApp, WeChat and others) is to entice users to switch to its platform as their primary chat service.
Sticky service
Chat is a pretty sticky service and, if a brand can entice users to switch, its overall service use would likely increase considerably, enhancing its value to advertisers and causing users to pay an even higher price for these “free” services.
In the meantime, hopes for an open web, based on interoperable standards and protocols, are fading. Our hopes now lie with companies such as Mozilla and to an extent, ironically, with Google (still an advocate for an open web) and their desire to move beyond closed platforms to continue building an interoperable web capable of generating meaningful revenue to support free services.
Paul Jacobson (@pauljacobson) is the founder and director of Web•Tech•Law. He contributes the regular “Tech Law” column focusing on issues in the digital marketing space to MarkLives.com. CC BY-SA 2.5