Can Privacy be a Premium Service?
Om Malik suggests for a $1 a month people would pay the search engines to remove their digital search footprint in his blog post here.
If not today, but soon enough, we might be willing to pay to protect the privacy, and erase the digital footprints we are leaving behind…………….turn privacy into an opportunity for making money
The search engine giants - Ask, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Google - have started to put privacy protection procedures in place, but they are meaningless. At least three of them will be keeping our search data for a year - which is too long. For a nominal fee of say a $1 a month, they should offer us ability to erase our search behavior every week
Jekyll: I think its more like the argument made by Nicholas Carr in IT Doesn’t Matter. Carr argued that when a technology becomes commodities like railways or telephones then its table stakes and no longer a competitive advantage. I think online privacy and security are the same. They are expected. If you don’t have them you will have a competitive dis-advantage and optimizing them can gain efficiencies but they are unlikely to be a competitive advantage.
Hyde: I recently thought about the implications of hosting a business providing security services in international waters like Sealand where localized laws would may not apply. I suspect large companies would pay a premium for such an arrangement.
July 27, 2007 at 3:41 pm
No, privacy won’t work as a premuim service here for several reasons: first, customers don’t understand the threat, second, companies can market privacy less expensively than delivering technical solutions, and finally, the privacy-concerned are unlikely to believe that the company really implemented privacy for their money.