A blog by Jeremy Gin

Last night I had the opportunity to participate on a panel titled Money and Privacy held at Stanford Law School. Other panelists included Erika Rottenberg, General Counsel of LinkedIn, Julie Martin, Associate General Counsel of Mozilla, and Lauren Gelman, former director of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and founder of BlurryEdge Strategies. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford’s CIS, moderated and did a great job organizing the panel.

Although the discussion ranged from data security to privacy compliance across international jurisdictions, I found one of the most interesting points to be around the near-term and long-term relationship between corporate profits and consumer privacy. To summarize: I think the panel agreed in the near-term it’s quite possible for consumer privacy to be at odds with profits. Zynga has been made a recent example of this in the news. However, in building a successful business in the long-term, companies must build trust with their customers, and respecting consumer privacy is an important part of this. As a result, I believe the panel agreed that long-term profitability and consumer privacy are actually often very much aligned, as is evidenced by the success of LinkedIn, Mozilla, and hopefully SiteJabber.

What perhaps remains to be seen is whether companies like Zynga and Facebook, which have taken liberties with their users’ privacy, will suffer in the longer-term. At some point, will their customers feel abused and revolt? Will the FTC come knocking on their door? We’ll have to wait and see.

Note: SiteJabber recently published a brief guide to privacy for consumers. We tried to make it as concise as possible, but please let me know if you have comments or suggestions.