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The right to be let alone
EDITORIAL THE RIGHT TO BE LET ALONE
John Deighton
JOHN DEIGHTON is at Harvard Business School, Harvard University.
j
Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 voiced the idea that each of us has a ‘‘right to be let alone.’’ If there really was such a right, if people claimed it, and if it were enforced, the direct marketing industry would be rather smaller than it is today. It is some comfort to the industry, therefore, that Mr. Brandeis’s phrase, written in a dissent from a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, falls well short of any privacy law passed by any legislature in any state or nation on the globe, despite the regularity with which the desire to be let alone appears on the wish lists of voters. Indeed some scholars argue that a universal and all-purpose protection of individual privacy is impossible. Westin (1995) contends that no durable definition of privacy is possible because privacy issues are fundamentally matters of values, interests, and power. Certainly the idea of privacy is so hedged about with personal and contextual considerations that legislative interventions are few and unsatisfactory. His recent review of the effectiveness of just one act of restricted and precise applicability, the Privacy Act of 1974 to protect citizens against privacy invasion by the U.S. government, concludes, ‘‘The act addresses the full range of fair information practice and it applies them to all government records about individuals. . . . Yet the act clearly failed to offer any real resistance to broader and unforeseen uses of personal information supported by computers. . . . Compliance with the Privacy Act is an afterthought at most agencies’’ (Westin 1995).
q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc. CCC 1094-9968/98/020002-03 ■ JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
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E D I T O R I A L (CONTINUED)
I want to argue that there is little consolation to be had from the sad history of efforts to fix in law the public’s long and vocal discontent with the erosion of personal privacy. Privacy invasion will hurt the invaders whether or not it ever becomes criminalized. The vivid phrase ‘‘resigned disgust’’ was chosen by many consumers to convey their attitudes to direct marketing practices in a recent survey by Hoffman and Novak (1977). They were communicating a distaste that is an economic barrier to the effective operation of this industry, whether or not it ever becomes a legal barrier. And as the direct marketing industry evolves into the interactive marketing industry, and depends more on interactive media such as the World Wide Web, sensitivity to customer concerns about privacy will determine success. Everything on the Web is ultimately about trust, says Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital. We trust brands, we trust friends, and we trust our own experience, he observes, and we will do the same in cyberspace. The direct marketing industry can, with good reason, call itself a frontrunner in the race to colonize cyberspace. But unless the industry gives trust a little more respect, the frontrunner will not be the winner in the long haul. Whether deserved or not, the industry’s reputation is its burden, the accumulation of years of dinners interrupted by telemarketers, private transaction records sold in the public market, and sly, intrusive suggestions that, ‘‘You may already have won . . . !’’ It was not always so. The pioneers of direct marketing in the U.S. knew that trust mattered. Without it their industry would never take off. They earned trust by using a consumer’s personal information with respect, by implementing catalog returns policies so generous that consumers would tell their friends about their happy experiences, and by giving prompt and courteous customer service on the customer’s terms, not the marketer’s. They overcame the
timidity of would-be buyers, and slowly won their confidence in the new medium. Today Americans have a faith in commerceby-mail that is the envy of marketers in many other parts of the globe. The pioneers of the industry wrote the terms of a social contract that later entrants would be able to rely on, a contract so robust that it could survive occasional subsequent betrayal. Now we face another market that must be taught to trust. The digital domain is, for all its jargon, just another place where humans size up other humans and decide whether to get vulnerable. And vulnerable they must be if they want to trade on the Internet. In the physical world, they can choose to be anonymous, trading cash for goods and moving on with no trace of their identity left behind. When they trade in cyberspace, anonymity is not an option. They have to say who they are, how to get back to them, and what their credit record is worth, or the transaction falls apart. They will give this information only if they are confident that it will not be used against them. If they are not sure of that, they know full well that there are many other ways to do business, and they will cast their vote to defer the arrival of the digital age. Deeper insight into the human need for privacy, then, is perhaps as important to the blossoming of the interactive marketing industry as any single factor. We need to understand why so often people want to be let alone, and why sometimes they do not. Marketing fundamentally, of course, is about meeting customer needs. In the matter of privacy, what are the needs that are met and not met? Academic researchers can be useful here. The topic of privacy deserves much more scholarly attention in marketing than it has received. When consumers complain about invasions of their privacy, what are they really saying? They are probably saying several things. Some are saying, perhaps, that they want better control over
JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING j VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
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E D I T O R I A L (CONTINUED)
their own identities. They want to be the ones who regulate the information traces that they leave and the impressions that they create on others. Some perhaps are saying that they want to choose the degrees of intimacy in relationships. Some are anticipating specific injuries, but more are probably bothered by injuries that they cannot anticipate and cannot forestall. Some, probably, see a trade-off between privacy and trust. Beneficial relationships are, almost definitionally, relationships of trust. We forego privacy cheerfully when we see the prospect of a beneficial relationship. Indeed, Deutsch (1962) defines trust as actions that increase vulnerability. The links between privacy, the management of identity, trust in relational exchange, vulnerability in relationships, and willingness to transact are all fruitful areas for careful research. Such research will supply leads for managerial action to balance in some more acceptable fashion the needs of customers with the intrusions of interactive marketers. The direct marketers who will thrive as inter-
active marketers in the digital age will be those who, like the early catalog marketers, know how to convince customers that it is safe to get exposed. Their success will never be imitated, because the formula for trust cannot be stolen or copied. It is what some call brand equity.
REFERENCES Deutsch, M. (1962), ‘‘Cooperation and Trust: Some Theoretical Notes,’’ in Marshal R. Jones (ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 275 – 320. Hoffman, D.L. and Novak, T.P. (1997), ‘‘Privacy and Electronic Commerce,’’ Handout prepared for EFF/ Silicon Valley Industry Briefing with Ira Magaziner on Global Electronic Commerce and Personal Privacy Protection, August 5, 1997. Westin, A. (1995), ‘‘Privacy in America: An Historical and Socio-Political Analysis,’’ National Privacy and Public Policy Symposium, Hartford, CT, cited in Philip A. Agre and Marc Rotenberg (eds.), Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING j VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
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/ 8s11$$0266
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direda
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John Deighton
JOHN DEIGHTON is at Harvard Business School, Harvard University.
j
Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 voiced the idea that each of us has a ‘‘right to be let alone.’’ If there really was such a right, if people claimed it, and if it were enforced, the direct marketing industry would be rather smaller than it is today. It is some comfort to the industry, therefore, that Mr. Brandeis’s phrase, written in a dissent from a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, falls well short of any privacy law passed by any legislature in any state or nation on the globe, despite the regularity with which the desire to be let alone appears on the wish lists of voters. Indeed some scholars argue that a universal and all-purpose protection of individual privacy is impossible. Westin (1995) contends that no durable definition of privacy is possible because privacy issues are fundamentally matters of values, interests, and power. Certainly the idea of privacy is so hedged about with personal and contextual considerations that legislative interventions are few and unsatisfactory. His recent review of the effectiveness of just one act of restricted and precise applicability, the Privacy Act of 1974 to protect citizens against privacy invasion by the U.S. government, concludes, ‘‘The act addresses the full range of fair information practice and it applies them to all government records about individuals. . . . Yet the act clearly failed to offer any real resistance to broader and unforeseen uses of personal information supported by computers. . . . Compliance with the Privacy Act is an afterthought at most agencies’’ (Westin 1995).
q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc. CCC 1094-9968/98/020002-03 ■ JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
2
/ 8s11$$0266
04-21-98 16:37:48
direda
W: Dir Mktg
E D I T O R I A L (CONTINUED)
I want to argue that there is little consolation to be had from the sad history of efforts to fix in law the public’s long and vocal discontent with the erosion of personal privacy. Privacy invasion will hurt the invaders whether or not it ever becomes criminalized. The vivid phrase ‘‘resigned disgust’’ was chosen by many consumers to convey their attitudes to direct marketing practices in a recent survey by Hoffman and Novak (1977). They were communicating a distaste that is an economic barrier to the effective operation of this industry, whether or not it ever becomes a legal barrier. And as the direct marketing industry evolves into the interactive marketing industry, and depends more on interactive media such as the World Wide Web, sensitivity to customer concerns about privacy will determine success. Everything on the Web is ultimately about trust, says Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital. We trust brands, we trust friends, and we trust our own experience, he observes, and we will do the same in cyberspace. The direct marketing industry can, with good reason, call itself a frontrunner in the race to colonize cyberspace. But unless the industry gives trust a little more respect, the frontrunner will not be the winner in the long haul. Whether deserved or not, the industry’s reputation is its burden, the accumulation of years of dinners interrupted by telemarketers, private transaction records sold in the public market, and sly, intrusive suggestions that, ‘‘You may already have won . . . !’’ It was not always so. The pioneers of direct marketing in the U.S. knew that trust mattered. Without it their industry would never take off. They earned trust by using a consumer’s personal information with respect, by implementing catalog returns policies so generous that consumers would tell their friends about their happy experiences, and by giving prompt and courteous customer service on the customer’s terms, not the marketer’s. They overcame the
timidity of would-be buyers, and slowly won their confidence in the new medium. Today Americans have a faith in commerceby-mail that is the envy of marketers in many other parts of the globe. The pioneers of the industry wrote the terms of a social contract that later entrants would be able to rely on, a contract so robust that it could survive occasional subsequent betrayal. Now we face another market that must be taught to trust. The digital domain is, for all its jargon, just another place where humans size up other humans and decide whether to get vulnerable. And vulnerable they must be if they want to trade on the Internet. In the physical world, they can choose to be anonymous, trading cash for goods and moving on with no trace of their identity left behind. When they trade in cyberspace, anonymity is not an option. They have to say who they are, how to get back to them, and what their credit record is worth, or the transaction falls apart. They will give this information only if they are confident that it will not be used against them. If they are not sure of that, they know full well that there are many other ways to do business, and they will cast their vote to defer the arrival of the digital age. Deeper insight into the human need for privacy, then, is perhaps as important to the blossoming of the interactive marketing industry as any single factor. We need to understand why so often people want to be let alone, and why sometimes they do not. Marketing fundamentally, of course, is about meeting customer needs. In the matter of privacy, what are the needs that are met and not met? Academic researchers can be useful here. The topic of privacy deserves much more scholarly attention in marketing than it has received. When consumers complain about invasions of their privacy, what are they really saying? They are probably saying several things. Some are saying, perhaps, that they want better control over
JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING j VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
3
/ 8s11$$0266
04-21-98 16:37:48
direda
W: Dir Mktg
E D I T O R I A L (CONTINUED)
their own identities. They want to be the ones who regulate the information traces that they leave and the impressions that they create on others. Some perhaps are saying that they want to choose the degrees of intimacy in relationships. Some are anticipating specific injuries, but more are probably bothered by injuries that they cannot anticipate and cannot forestall. Some, probably, see a trade-off between privacy and trust. Beneficial relationships are, almost definitionally, relationships of trust. We forego privacy cheerfully when we see the prospect of a beneficial relationship. Indeed, Deutsch (1962) defines trust as actions that increase vulnerability. The links between privacy, the management of identity, trust in relational exchange, vulnerability in relationships, and willingness to transact are all fruitful areas for careful research. Such research will supply leads for managerial action to balance in some more acceptable fashion the needs of customers with the intrusions of interactive marketers. The direct marketers who will thrive as inter-
active marketers in the digital age will be those who, like the early catalog marketers, know how to convince customers that it is safe to get exposed. Their success will never be imitated, because the formula for trust cannot be stolen or copied. It is what some call brand equity.
REFERENCES Deutsch, M. (1962), ‘‘Cooperation and Trust: Some Theoretical Notes,’’ in Marshal R. Jones (ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 275 – 320. Hoffman, D.L. and Novak, T.P. (1997), ‘‘Privacy and Electronic Commerce,’’ Handout prepared for EFF/ Silicon Valley Industry Briefing with Ira Magaziner on Global Electronic Commerce and Personal Privacy Protection, August 5, 1997. Westin, A. (1995), ‘‘Privacy in America: An Historical and Socio-Political Analysis,’’ National Privacy and Public Policy Symposium, Hartford, CT, cited in Philip A. Agre and Marc Rotenberg (eds.), Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING j VOLUME 12 / NUMBER 2 / SPRING 1998
4
/ 8s11$$0266
04-21-98 16:37:48
direda
W: Dir Mktg