Privacy as a marketing tool

Abstract

Technology and social media have taken over our lives; they have brought the world closer and made our day-to-day functioning a thousand times easier. But, as we explore new ways to connect and serve people, concerns over the use of technology to target specific individuals and unethical gathering of user data increase. There has been a lot of chatter around privacy recently, with every government developing new laws and regulations for digital bodies. The recent case of WhatsApp user data being gathered through data scrapping has put the spotlight on who is responsible for the data collected by various websites. With a slew of such incidents every day, users have started to question what data is stored by multiple applications, how it is stored, and how it is being used. We believe these doubts are just the tip of the iceberg; as consumers get more educated on data storage and use, they will start every app and platform they use. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have already begun facing questions from regulators and users regarding their data privacy practices, but companies that feel they are immune to this scenario right now, may not be in such a rosy place in a few years. Privacy may soon be a central criterion for consumers when choosing a platform, which is why tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Google have already started advertising their “superior privacy policy.” The general trend is that companies will falter on some privacy parameter, i.e., there will be a misuse of data or a leak, after which companies start using privacy-related terms in their advertising. The most prominent example is the media strategy followed by WhatsApp post the global fallout after updating its privacy policy. The new policy suggested that WhatsApp would share some of the user data with Facebook and other companies. Users in India started switching to competitors of WhatsApp, such as Signal and Telegram. Following this reaction, WhatsApp lost to signal and telegram on the number of downloads for the first time, and the company stepped into action. They spent millions of Rupees on over 10 English and Hindi ads published in every mainstream newspaper.