Ok ok,

Suppose a company offered you a billion dollars in exchange for a portion of your privacy. To make this arrangement palatable, imagine that the company promises that your data will only be used anonymously. You don’t totally trust them, but it’s not as if you rob banks in your spare time. You don’t have much to hide.

Now imagine that you can selectively leave out of this deal any future plans that are deeply personal. And you can leave out anything that might get you fired, embarrassed, or injured in any way. Those exclusions would be allowed by contract. And you could leave out any mention of your past, where most of your misdeeds happened anyway. Now do you accept this deal?

Most of you probably said yes, although you might have more questions about this arrangement just to be sure you’re not dealing with Satan. Now suppose instead of a billion dollars, the company only offered a million. Some of you would walk away at that price. How about $100,000?

My point is that your privacy has an economic value. Or it could, if such a market was created. Today you give away your privacy for nothing, in dribs and drabs. Your credit card company knows some things about you, your phone company knows others, and FaceBook knows a lot.

One thing that all of those companies have in common is that the private information they possess involves mostly your past, and not so much your future. When you post pictures on Facebook, it is a record of where you were, not a prediction of where you will be. Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next.

Privacy about your past is so cheap that you literally give it away. Privacy about your future plans is another matter. That has real value.

Obviously the past has some utility for predicting the future. If you enjoy a certain activity today, you’ll probably like it tomorrow. But predictions based on the past do not have the same economic value as, for example, knowing that you plan to buy a truck in the next month. Or perhaps you are planning a trip to Europe, or planning to find a new job. Private knowledge of your future would be worth a lot to advertisers. You wouldn’t give away that sort of privacy for nothing.

Cheers.
ps: True Story

Ok ok,

I like problems. Where there are problems there are opportunities. I don’t think it can work any other way. No one wishes for problems, but when a bus goes into a ravine, the undertaker gets more business. When top government executives partake in sexual orgies, the underlings get a promotion. That’s just the way the world is wired.

I credit the problems I had in winning the Nobel Peace Price for my career in IT. Had my path been smoother I would probably be preaching peace at the peaks on Himalayas while enjoying my brown tea. But that’s just the way the world is wired.

Tell me your career-related problems. I will happily translate those problems into a joke, thus transforming your problems into your entertainment. If you can’t solve a problem, the next best thing is to squeeze some laughs out of it.

Cheers.
ps: Tea tastes more crisp at mountain tops. True Story.