I used to tell people:
If social media had been around when I worked at Enron, there’s no way the “smartest guys in the room” could have gotten away with things they did. The repercussions of fall of that Fortune 10 giant is still being felt by businesses every day, in financial and accounting reform.
This weekend, I’m thinking:
If Twitter had been around when the airplanes hit the World Trade center, would we have been able to save more people? Or would our remembrances be just that much more precise and painful?
How far we’ve come in such a short time.
Ten years ago, transparency inside an organization was nothing like it is today. Ten years ago, our citizens were glued to the TV as we watched the tragic events of 9/11 unfold. This weekend, ten years later, we will share our thoughts via Twitter and Facebook while watching and reading 9/11 remembrances. In a study earlier this year, Yahoo! found that 86% of mobile Internet users (and 92% of 13-24s) are using their mobile devices simultaneously with TV.
One of the lasting effects of 9/11 was a surge in technology – especially around security and surveillance. Pair that with the surge in social sharing (the ultimate in transparency today), and we have a pretty significant (and “creepy”) future to contend with. This came home to me as I was listening to a fascinating story on Marketplace about just that, today.
From the story:
STEVE HENN: A couple weeks ago at a conference in Las Vegas, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University named Alessandro Acquisti showed me a neat trick. He takes out his iPhone and boots up a custom-made app. It’s designed to take a picture of a person — any person — then using a facial recognition program made by PittPatt, the app compares that picture to profile photos published on Facebook. And bingo — the person’s identity is revealed.
HENN: Can you take my picture and see if you can identify me?
ALESSANDRO ACQUISTI: Ah, we can try.
HENN: Yeah.
Sixty seconds later, Acquisti’s iPhone has found me. It has my real name and a picture of me sitting with two of my kids on the stoop of my old house in Washington, D.C. It also had scanned the web and found a picture of me at cocktail party in Los Angeles, holding a martini, with my arm around a colleague. This picture actually got me in trouble with my mother-in-law.
Worse yet, the story goes on, the application tries to ‘guess’ his social security number, given his hometown listing on Facebook… PittPatt, by the way, was recently purchased by Google. Make you feel better?
I don’t think we need to fast forward even two or three years before we’re facing some very ugly (no pun intended) privacy challenges; given how willingly billions of us share information online; and how far technology has come.
Buckle up. Let’s explore these challenges together. The first step is awareness.
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