I just changed my account settings and turned the personalization network off on Facebook. It’s been a major hullabaloo that Facebook keeps making these privacy rules and that instead of opting IN to these applications you have to go to an extraordinary effort to opt OUT.
I was listening to my favorite morning radio show, and the DJ and company were talking about it. Now, the Bob Rivers Show has about 5-6 people every morning. Bob, Spike, Joe and Maura are probably all between 40-50. I’m guessing Pedro is in his mid-late 30’s and Aric is the youngest on the team. They asked Aric, "do you care about the privacy settings?" His response was "not really."
So this is why I believe privacy is going to become less and less of an opt IN feature in the next few years. I’ve been studying the Millenials (GenY) from a recruiting/HR viewpoint. We, GenX; the Jones Generation and the Baby Boomers have watched as technology has entered the daily life of the general population over the last twenty years. But let us consider: GenY grew up with computers and video games and cell phones. They don’t remember a time before all these wired devices kept them connected to their social peers. The point is, *they don’t see a need for privacy.*
As a generation they have built their world electronically. They *like* having things turned on and "fed" to them. They don’t *care* about predictive modeling algorithms like Pandora and Amazon recommendations. It means they don’t have to put through effort to get things. Read an email? No thanks, send me a text. Short, sweet, and then onto the next thing. They are uber-multitaskers. Is that a good thing? The jury is still out on that, but for now it doesn’t really matter. Companies are gearing everything from their marketing and sales campaigns to their job postings to *this* generation, not those of us that already have our spending and activity patterns pretty well set. They are trying to capture market share with a generation that has a very short attention span and wants their information in short bursts, and pushed *to* them rather than then needing to go out and *look* for it.
So those of us that are older and concerned about privacy and the electronic veil thinning more every day had better get ready for it to become even thinner. And make our peace with it or pull over on the information highway.