Privacy Paranoia Part I: What are we afraid of?

If a stranger asked you on the street "What is your street address?" you would probably be pretty startled at his presumption and walk away. What part of town you're from is friendly chit-chat, but street address is a tad too specific for comfort. After all, what business could he possibly have with your address? However, If that same stranger is standing behind a counter at a store, wearing a uniform asking the same question, you still might not give him your address, but you'd have a better sense of why he was asking, what he's likely to do with the information and how it will affect your life (more snail mail SPAM).You may also wonder if the stranger will abuse his access privileges and re-purpose your personal information for his own interests, possibly at your expense (e.g. identity theft). How likely is this? That depends on a whole host of factors from the brand and reputation of the store, your past experiences with the store, the dress and mannerisms of the stranger, personal biases, etc.When a security gate asks you to identify yourself with your swipe card, you volunteer personal information (who you are, where you are and when you were there) without even thinking about it. The social contract is clear: If I tell you who I am, you (the disembodied security system instituted by the disembodied corporation I work for) will let me in so I can go to work, make money and support myself and my expensive spending habits. Besides, who cares if everyone in the world knows that I was at work at 9:14 AM in the morning? How could that information possibly harm me in the future?Finally, when your doctor wants to know if you're sexually active or abusing drugs, depending on how ill you feel, how desperate you are to feel better and the political leanings of the hospital, you'll spill your guts, because that's what you're supposed to do with doctors.Once you get past these questions of Who, Why, For What and How, you might ask yourself if the person, business or organization who is asking for your information is even capable of taking responsibility for it.Clearly, we wear our personal information on our sleeves in a variety of ways in a broad range of situations every day, multiple times a day. Yet, as an industry, we've pretty much given up on the idea that users will volunteer personal information to a web service. Instead, we resort to not-so-subtle tricks that we hope our users won't notice. Clever default settings and EULAs we know our users don't read. However, this is neither the right way to go about building a user base, nor is it sustainable. It is also, by no means, the only way.Privacy Paranoia Part II: What are they afraid of?