Some have said that privacy is dead in the era of social media. But privacy has not been completely tossed away. In recent years, the FTC has filed complaints against Google, Facebook, and Path for violating their subscribers’ privacy. Given a choice: will the Web public pay more for a truly private messaging service instead of using the more convenient and free social networking services? On Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, I stopped by Sgrouples booth to meet up with its founder, Mark Weinstein, and learn if a different model for social media privacy is possible.
By the way it’s significant that none of the aforementioned services broke any specific US online privacy laws. For the general public–excluding COPPA’s child privacy protection–there ain’t any. The FTC instead charged these operator with “deceptive business practices”: the companies made privacy statements in their terms of service that they didn’t honor. Taking a different approach, Sgrouples really means when it says you own your data.
You could say that even Facebook makes the same statement.The difference is that Sgrouples enforces this principle by not sharing your data with third-parties or advertisers unless you explicitly opt-in–no ads, no tracking, and no information sold to brokers. In other words, you default setting is opt-out. Currently this privacy protection is free, and eventually, after they grow their network, they’ll charges for this.
What do you get with Sgrouples? It’s a basic social sharing service where you post status, documents, and photos. You can also create groups; however, you’ll generally need to send an invite through an external email since Sgrouples’ member search requires opt-in as well. By the way, I was assured by Sgrouple’s CTO that when you delete content, it is gone forever, and so your right to be forgotten is preserved.
I chatted briefly with Weinstein about privacy on the Web. He thinks whatever law that comes out of Congress– likely the long delayed Commercial Bill of Rights–will be too diluted to be meaningful. He makes the point that the free market has to step in to prove that people will pay for meaningful privacy. Though I disagreed with his view of the role of public policy in this area–private industry needs a kick in the googles to get them motivated–I wished him luck with his venture.