Privacy Versus Convenience, And The Future Of Internet Marketing

Privacy and convenience have been pulling people in different directions even before the Internet was created. Consumers had unlisted phone numbers to keep junk mail and telemarketers at bay; corporate buyers withheld important details about their business to keep competitors and salespeople guessing.

But the tradeoff between privacy and convenience is probably the major issue of Internet marketing today and tomorrow — due to, among other things, the effects of horrific, widely publicized security breaches and the perceived (and probably actual) intrusiveness of data collection and tracking done by social media platforms, online advertisers, healthcare organizations and government agencies.

Will heightened privacy concerns lead consumers to shield data to such an extent that Internet marketing becomes ineffective? Here are articles that explore the issues — important reading for Internet marketing professionals. 

• Is It Privacy Versus Convenience? A discussion of the issue from the perspective of the healthcare industry. Healthcare data is even more in the forefront of privacy issues than the online marketing industry, so how consumers handle their medical information will influence their behavior in the marketing realm. 
• How security became more important than convenience. A little history, and lots of data and specific insights in this article from Engadget.
• Pizza Over Privacy? A Paradox of the Digital Age. Consumers talk a good game, but at crunch time they’d rather have pizza than privacy. That is one of the insights in this enlightening exploration of online user behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
• Privacy and IoT. IoT technologies are still in early development and are catching on fast with the public. Privacy issues figure to play a bigger part in the discussion when rank-and-file consumers start to consider articles such as this one and this one.
• The Rise of Ad Blockers: Should Advertisers Be Panicking?(!!). An excellent summary of the actual and perceived threat of ad blockers to online marketing from WordStream. 
• Survey: Social commerce held back by security, privacy concerns. Marketing Land recaps a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults that suggests (or confirms) general doubts about the effectiveness of doing business on social platforms.
• DuckDuckGo is the leading privacy-driven search engine, and recently hit a milestone of 30 million searches a day, as Mashable reports. Is this enough to worry Google or search engine marketers? Probably not, but then again, there was a time when few people took Google seriously.