R.I.P.: Re-Imagine Privacy Through a Trust Lens

By Sharon Bauer

Privacy as we know it is dead. It has ceased to exist. Fields grow where it lays. Its children no longer visit. While your privacy is dead, your personal information, on the other hand, including your most intimate details, is alive, well, growing, and of immense value. Each day, 2.6 quintillion bytes of data is created. Over the past two years alone, 90% of the data in the world was generated. 

We have been giving away our personal information for decades; since the first credit card company in the 1950’s started to track our purchases. Through those decades, we have become comfortable giving away our information. However, most of us experience cognitive dissonance before we click the ‘I Agree’ button - a brief moment of unease where we want to move forward to use the app or website, however, we are not quite sure what we have to give up to do so. Despite this moment of discomfort, our general pattern of behaviour is to put the horse-blinders on, click the ‘I Agree’ button, and never think about it again because it's more convenient to move on. That is called the Privacy Paradox. 

That brief moment of unease that we experience is instilled in us from hearing about  privacy breaches that we have either been affected by personally or ones that we can relate to. Consumers are starting to question what companies are doing with their information when left to their own devices with unrestricted access to consumer devices. A reckoning is starting to form whereby consumers are demanding to know what companies are doing with their information and demanding to have more control over their information. 

Consumers have succumbed to the lack of privacy they have, and have come to terms that they must give up their information to participate in society and remain relevant. They know their information is ‘out there’ and they are not getting it back. They know that short of living in a cave, this way of life will not change. Consumers know their privacy is dead, which is why they are searching for companies that are responsible with the information they are forced to give up. They are seeking companies they trust. 

So in light of this paradigm shift, companies that want to remain relevant, profitable and future-ready for this reckoning, must re-imagine privacy through the lens of trust and transparency. When companies re-imagine privacy through trust and transparency and change their approach to consumer information, they are telling consumers that they are on their side. Those companies give consumers a reason to trust them in a trustless world. That is powerful. 

But the time for companies to act is now, before their competitors beat them to it. Trust and transparency can be a company’s competitive advantage, especially once consumers wonder why competing companies are not being transparent and responsible with their information. According to a recent Cisco study, companies that invest in trust initiatives will see a significant return on their investment. There are three primary reasons for this: 

(1) Trust drives action: Consumers flee from companies they no longer trust and flock to companies, often competitors, they do trust. Trusted companies will have the market share of consumers. One such example is in 2021 when Whatsapp released its new privacy policy that put into question some of its personal information handling practices. Many users left Whatsapp and flocked to Signal which was able to demonstrate a more trustworthy practice. Signal presumably saw a 4000% increase in account creation in just one month. 

(2) Trust drives loyalty: According to a 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report, consumers who trust a company will remain loyal to the company. In today’s age, companies will experience a breach. That is inevitable. What is not certain is whether consumers will stay loyal to the brand after it experiences a breach. If they do not trust the company, they will leave. If they do trust the company, consumers are more likely to remain loyal, defend the brand, and even promote it, irrespective of the breach.  

(3) Trust drives data: Consumers who trust a company will not only flock to the company but will be enticed to give it more information than they otherwise would because they know the company will do right by them. More trust. More data. More profit. 

At Bamboo, we have worked with forward-thinking businesses, home-named brands, who made a strategic decision to make trust and transparency part of the DNA of their company. We helped them implement four building blocks, which we call the four “C’s”: Clarity, Culture, Craft and Communication. Feel free to read more about those building blocks in our blog post: Building Blocks to Earning Trust: The 4 C’s. 

However, the secret sauce to re-imagining privacy, to earning trust, to having a competitive advantage, is to be proactive, not reactive. Do not wait for privacy laws to tell your company what you need to do. Do not treat this process as a check-the-box exercise. Re-imagine privacy through trust and transparency because you want to, not because you need to - consumers can smell the difference. 

The time to re-imagine privacy, to stay relevant, is now. 

PRIVACY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE TRUST.