A shift in perspective is necessary to see consumer choice is still with us despite an age of involuntary personalized service.

By Sheila Dean

Generational chafing is common as older generations come in contact with the energetic intention of younger generations.  One of the rubbing points comes to how personalization is being entrained into young adults. This is a modern and fairly recent problem. How it impacts diverse generations relying on a digital environment is worth considering.

So what happens when young adults have been trained by both online and first-job retail experiences to prioritize personalized interactions? Young adults are paid to perform personally invasive practices and they are prone to arbitrarily over-sharing the personal information of consumers.  When elder consumers predictably reject invasive advances in business, when asked for Too Much Information (TMI), they are often confused, hurt and angry. They were doing as they were instructed by bosses. So where is their social reward?  There really isn’t an authentic one to be had.  They have been set up to fail.

Young people are taught “know your customer” processes by their bosses. They are told this is how to provide top-of-the-line consumer service. Personalization has been also spun in Public Relations over a period of nearly 20 years as a highly desired social intimacy practice, preferred by consumers who want the elite service of a stalking butler. If we are being honest, involuntary personalization is an invasive social engineering scheme.  When the experience is translated more colloquially, we are baited for business doxxing and the practice is “creepy AF” for normal users.

Incoming younger generations cannot be expected to know creditor “Know Your Customer” policies are some of the most onerous, invasive banking requirements to impact consumer privacy in modern business history.  They would have to learn principles of prioritizing the desired choices of the customer by asking good questions.  Modern retailers aren’t necessarily teaching this core sales floor skill right now.  It is defeating their sales staff and their walk-in consumers.

Personalization is a fantastic deal for digital marketers and online businesses.  Since the 1990’s there has been consistent clash amid consumers over monetized identity personalization making  gains in popular commercial culture.  Marketers say you want personalization so they can get better sales performance. Consumers don’t necessarily want the personalization when they are given the option. 

More often they are forced into it by retail when they come to the counter for purchase with small print form of notice-as-consent when they walk out of the store with a receipt.  If we’re being honest, marketers haven’t really given consumers a choice in whether or not there will be personalization in retail if you do business with many of them.

>>>BASIC: How to evaluate an online service for privacy

Young adults want and need good jobs and opportunity for economic growth so they can get on with their lives, leaving the nest appropriately.  Retail jobs are what they get until they can make the migration to more solid career work. Today, they might make a career migration to online platforms where consumer choice is unnaturally forfeited in the data business exchange.  They make meetings with older, stronger funding partners who have one cudgel: don’t obstruct any data making us money.

Once, I sat across from a young man at a large Seattle IP firm who chastised me for offering privacy services.  He argued businesses are entitled to money made from consumer data any way they could come by it.  In the next breath, he said the Terms of Service doesn’t give the consumer any choice anyway.  I then asked him, “Do you want a choice?”  To the surprise of everyone present, he replied, “Yes.”

Transactional banking technologists, and the eager firms who feed them, rain down money on those who provide their business ecology with data.  I once began reading a data ecologist’s paper on the subject of consumer privacy.  What it evolved into was a paper chastising the consumer practice of obfuscation for producing “bad data”.  It made me wonder what it might be like to read a published paper on abolition practice written by a slave owner.  While it was a completely unconvincing read, it is a great illustration of the mind and heart of Big Data on the matter of privacy.  It did convert me to an understanding of their apparently unrequited need for authentic transactional data.   

CAEVAT: FEED IT SOMETHING, BUT NOT THE KIDS, PLEASE.

Wood chippers will run when you turn them on.  Whatever you feed into them is blown out in small pieces at the other end, forever altering the initial form of what was originally fed into it.   Similarly, data brokerages will accept identities and blow them out into flakes of data to be reconstituted into a monetized spreadsheet product.  Like the wood chipper, you can feed the data brokers anything as they are operating, but it’s wrong to put your family in the line of feed. 

They want good data.  Consumers want integral privacy and choice.

Big Data operations are currently economically dependent on predatory information practices. It is worse for privacy today because transactional financiers instructed the legal marketplace to demand authentic and exhaustive market identity for e-purchases on the back of the September 11th attacks. This became the Know Your Customer policy.  Companies will need a certain level of forbearance to integrate consumer choice based on existing financial machining. While we must be functional in society, you don’t ever fundamentally owe structural enterprise a position to so severely leverage your interests against you. 

If you had a choice in the matter, what would it be?  If you could buy online without compromising everything about yourself, would you opt for it?  If there was an acceptable data currency to spring into the data business, instead of yourself, would you work toward trading on the alternative currency? Choice and economic alternatives can be invented for mutual benefit of companies and consumers.  It could all work out if we spent more time and energy on how to give privacy choice a chance. Dare to ask for better.

Our elders have conflicts with younger generations for a wide range of reasons.  However, elders outnumber young adults by larger and larger margins due to longevity.  As a result there is a glut of both wisdom and living witnesses who can attest the human family is not based on data usage, limits and social media dispersions. 

Our anthropological need for integral privacy is intact. The need for boundaries has not gone away just because Apple populated a mobile app store presenting privacy elusive contracts as standard.

The numbers of elders would prevail in a contest of money and power against the younger.  However, if we want to survive as a species, we need to understand the self-defeat in invasive social trade practices and how they impact long-term prospects of our young. 

Let’s provide an offering of self-correction worthy of sustaining all generations. Create a world with options to choose from, among them, privacy-as-needed.