Data Security and the Rise of the “It Depends” View
Are you willing to share your data with a third party?
Seems like a fairly easy question to ask. Yet, the answer is much harder define and pinpoint. Why is this you may ask? Well, it turns out our feelings towards sharing our personal information is highly contingent and context-dependent. It depends how and for what it will be used. It depends how we’re asked. It depends how transparent and clear third parties are with us. It depends how trustworthy they seem. It depends what I will get out of this exchange in return.
It just depends.
During a January 2016 Focus Group, the Pew Research Center had similar findings in that they found that regardless of household income, education, gender, etc., - most of us have ambivalent and ambiguous feelings towards third party access of our data.
Ambivalence and resignation, the new social reality of modern life.
Notably, a lot of the ambivalence emerges from the simple fact of how difficult it is to access third party’s terms of service or how hard it is to understand and make sense of it (can anyone say plain language). Lack of easy to understand and find terms of disclosure are the first step in empowering users to fight this seems of personal resignation that increasingly looms over our modern life. Seems easy enough you would think?
