Bookmark: "Privacy as Product"

2022-10-08

Bookmarked:

Privacy as Product

berjon.com

Privacy is a strategic product concern that is key to digital businesses and should be treated as such, not a nuisance to be lawyered away with wobbly incantations.

Robin Berjon’s critique of the “underdeveloped and unsophisticated approach to privacy and data governance” by most businesses points at how privacy is merely seen as a compliance issue – keeping the company out of trouble – while it actually is a product issue:

[…] the overwhelming majority of privacy problems that a website or app will face are not legal problems: they’re operational, product design, or revenue problems. You need a good legal partner who gets how operators work but you need your focus to be on the pain points, not on compliance theatre.

I like that framing. And the result of the described phenomenon is what you see every time when reading “We are taking your privacy seriously” on a website infested with invasive third-party tracking.

I'm Sebastian, Sociologist and Interaction Designer. This journal is mostly about bringing together social science and design for inclusive, privacy-focused, and sustainable "human-first" digital strategies. I also tend to a "digital garden" with carefully curated resources.

My occasionally sent email newsletter has all of the above, and there is of course also an RSS feed or my Mastodon/Fediverse profile.

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