Jeremy Gin

Last night I was on a lively Money and Privacy Panel at Stanford Law School. Panelists included Erika Rottenberg, Julie Martin, and Lauren Gelman. Ryan Calo, from Stanford’s CIS, moderated.

One issue we covered was the near-term and long-term relationship between corporate profits and consumer privacy. The panel agreed that while in the near-term it’s possible for privacy to be at odds with profits (Zynga might be a recent example), in the longer-term, if a company has any hopes of building a large and sustainable business they must build trust with customers and respecting privacy is at the core of this. So the interesting question then becomes, if this is true, then shouldn’t companies like Zynga and Facebook, which have taken liberties with their users’ privacy, suffer? So far they have not.

Note: SiteJabber recently published a brief guide to privacy for consumers.