Turning Privacy Into Opportunity at Mashup Events in London
Tonight I attended a Mashup Event in London on digital trends for 2011. It was an informative and fun evening. Historically I haven’t attended many of these types of events and I made a mental note to right that wrong in the future.
I was also happy that I could follow all the discussion and contribute thanks to the fact that I am truly up to date on the latest hi-tech news – for which I have my growing love affair with Twitter to thank. Staying up to date via Twitter forms part of the overall drive for ‘effectiveness over efficiency’ to steal a Tim Ferriss mantra. Happily, live tweeting also forms part of the Mashup Events with questions, suggestions and comments from the audience being incorporated into the dialogue by the speaker’s panel.
An unexpected topic that saw some lively action was user privacy. In his presentation on trends for 2011, panelist Gary Gale, forecast that ‘privacy will matter’ in the year ahead.
Although event organizer Simon Grice tweeted that he didn’t see 'privacy' as a trend, VC panelist Laurence John did forecast a trend whereby third party companies emerge to fight the protection battle on the user’s behalf. So I sign up to third party, who actually understands the complicated loopholes you need to jump through on Facebook to properly protect privacy and can systematically turn on and shut off data access or demand data back on my behalf.
Digital PR man James Poulter noted that outside of the early adopter market, the every day user of Facebook isn’t that educated or bothered about privacy issues. I piped up with a comment for the panel (yes I do still exist as a full functioning real-life human outside of twitosphere as well!):
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