The Web Generation

All of us who deal with web advertising and analytics are facing serious privacy issues. This is a constant struggle between the need of advertisers to know as much as possible about the user, and the need of the users to keep their privacy.
When you read the blogs and articles around this issue, you can imagine that privacy is a primary concern of most of the Internet users.
But is this really true?

IN one of the panels in the DLD conference I heard a very interesting idea.World demographic data shows that most of the people in the world are between the ages 16 and 34 (not to mention that these age group is probably behind the vast amount of web commerce). This fact means that in just a few years most of the people in the world will be among those who don’t even remember a world without Internet.
I got to admit that even me, although I remember how the web first looked, can’t really remember how I managed to do things before that. Can you truly remember how life was before you had email?

With his fact in mind, I got to wonder if privacy is that big of an issue for most people. While my parents are reluctant to even post a picture on the web, most kids today are happily posting all of their photos, videos, relationship status and their life stories into the web.
I don’t have accurate data, but I will bet that if someone have done a research on that we would have seen that most of those kids stay with the default public status, not making their data private.

So maybe for this new generation, it’s not privacy that is the main issue, but more of what do advertisers do with this information. As long as they don’t feel that you abuse their trust, as long as they feel that they get better web experience because of the use of this information, they will gladly share it with the rest of the world.