Don Tapscott

By Don Tapscott

The views expressed are his own.

What will happen in 2012? In the spirit of the aphorism “The future is not something to be predicted, it’s something to be achieved,” let me suggest 20 transformations (which Reuters is publishing in four groups of five; the first can be found here, the second here.) We need to make progress on these issues now to prevent next year from being a complete disaster.

These ideas are based on the research I did with Anthony D. Williams to write our recent book which comes out in January 2012 as a new edition entitled Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet.

All 20 are based on the idea that the industrial age has finally run out of gas and we need to rebuild most of our institutions for a new age of networked intelligence and a new set of principles – collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity. These big ideas will be the focus of much of my writing next year.

11. Privacy in the age of social networking

The privacy community is in shambles.  In the past the threat was Big Brother (governments) assembling detailed dossiers about us. Then came Little Brother (corporations) creating detailed customer profiles. Today the problem is the individuals themselves.  Hundreds of millions are revealing detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes/dislikes, etc. online every day.

This situation has turned traditional privacy laws and regulations upside down. Privacy and data protection laws emphasize the responsibility of organizations to collect, use, retain and disclose personal information in a confidential manner. But collaborative networks in contrast, encourage individuals themselves to directly and voluntarily publish granular data short-circuiting the obligations of organizations to seek informed consent.

To make things worse, some social networking leaders confuse this issue with transparency. But transparency is the obligation of institutions to communicate pertinent information to their stakeholders. Individuals have no such obligation. In fact, to have a secure life and self-determination, individuals have an obligation to protect their personal information. Transparency and privacy should go hand in hand.

I don’t buy the view that “Privacy is dead, get over it.”  Privacy is the foundation of a free society. What new can be done to prevent the destruction of privacy as we know it?

12.  Reversing the tide of climate change through global networks

Climate change seems to have fallen off the radar.  The failure of world leaders to negotiate a meaningful response to the problem of climate change has dented confidence in the ability of international institutions to provide effective leadership on this issue.

Rather than waiting for government action, people and institutions everywhere are beginning to collaborate—for the first time ever—around a single idea: changing the weather.  There are now distributed business laboratories where social entrepreneurs can launch experiments, build communities and attract funding for their ventures.

In social networks peers challenge each other to take actions that reduce emissions and measure their collective progress over time. We are seeing the rise of a “green technology commons” where industries share intellectual property and other assets that could hasten the transition to a low-carbon economy.  Web-based tools turn raw data into usable information, allowing stakeholders such as investors, regulators and ordinary citizens to monitor the progress of communities, nations, and corporations towards carbon neutrality.

What are these new networks that are mobilizing households, workplaces and communities around the world to confront the climate change crisis? What can be learned about achieving global cooperation from this extraordinary movement?

13. New models of democracy for the Digital Age

In many countries civic engagement by young people has been growing for years, but as evidenced by the November 2010 Federal Elections in the United States, around the world voting among young people is declining.  Governments and democracy run the danger of becoming irrelevant.  Many surveys show that young people are not comfortable with the old model where citizens are inert between elections and elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats do all the work.

To achieve social cohesion, good government and shared norms, the new realities demand a second wave of democracy based on a culture of public deliberation and active citizenship.  This is not direct democracy: it is about a new model of citizen engagement and politics appropriate for the 21^st century.  There are great new initiatives underway, especially at the city level.

14. Opening up the financial services industry

The global financial crisis destroyed long-term confidence in the financial services industry in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. But restoring confidence will require more than government intervention and new rules. What’s needed is an entirely new modus operandi for the financial services industry. Key players (banks, insurers, investment brokers, rating agencies and regulators) need to embrace transparency and integrity as the basis for credible and effective safeguards.

New models based on openness, transparency and participation are already changing many parts of the financial industry — from venture capital to mutual funds and even lending.

So why not deploy a digital response involving collaboration on a mass scale to properly evaluate and assess the value and risk of new financial instruments? Exposing complex financial instruments to the scrutiny of the thousands of experts who have the knowledge to vet the underlying assumptions could restore trust in banks, kick start venture capital, unfreeze the paralysis of lending markets and lay a foundation for a financial service industry that fosters the growth and prosperity of the world’s economies.

15. New models in health: Towards collaborative healthcare

Countries everywhere are struggling to develop effective yet affordable healthcare systems.  But all these debates assume an old model of health where patients are passive recipients of medical care and play little or no role in deciding their treatments plans. Patients are isolated from one another and rarely communicate or share knowledge. Healthcare occurs primarily when the citizen enters the healthcare system.

For many years, this was the only model possible.  But Web 2.0 puts the informed patient into a new context. It enables a new model of medicine experts call “collaborative healthcare.” This approach would be less expensive, safer and better.  For the first time, people could self-organize, contribute to the sum of medical knowledge, share information, support each other and become active in managing their own health.  Engaged patients manage their own health more effectively, reduce costs and improve medical outcomes. Every baby and citizen should have a web site – half medical record and half social network for health.  How do we get the medical establishment buy into it?  What are the implications for healthcare providers and policy makers?

By Don Tapscott

The views expressed are his own.

No doubt executives at Facebook are licking their wounds about the tough sanctions imposed on the company by the Federal Trade Commission last month. The social media juggernaut must now re-architect its systems and policies to protect privacy.  It’s likely the bankers preparing Facebook’s imminent IPO are feeling the pain, too.

But the FTC many have unwittingly saved the company. Privacy was Facebook’s Achilles heel and over the years they have continually got it wrong. Now the FTC is forcing them to get it right. The lessons learned by Facebook apply to all companies, not just social media web sites.

The FTC said that Facebook “deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.”  Facebook didn’t warn users that this would be happening.  The company also claimed that detailed user information would not be shared with advertisers, when they were doing exactly that. And when users left the service, Facebook said their information and photos would be removed when actually this information was still available.

As a pioneering social media company, Facebook is continually venturing into uncharted waters. Before Facebook arrived, few would have predicted that hundreds of millions of people would voluntarily log on to the Internet and record detailed almost minute-by-minute data about themselves, their activities, their likes and dislikes, and so on. The degree of detail that Facebook knows about its users is unprecedented.

Why has Facebook continually botched the privacy issue? Most think that this treasure chest of information has motivated Facebook executives to collect and monetize every scrap of data they can, even if that means undermining the privacy of its members. But there may be a deeper cultural reason.  In the book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick explains that some Facebook executives think transparency is not just an opportunity for companies and other institutions to disclose pertinent information about themselves (the very definition of transparency). They believe it’s an opportunity for individuals to do so as well.

The Facebook founders believe that “more visibility makes us better people,” according to Kirkpatrick. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.”

Some at Facebook refer to this as Radical Transparency — a term initially used to talk about institutions, and now being adapted to individuals. “Our mission since Day 1 has been to make society more open” says Dave Morin, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle. In other words, everyone should have just one identity, whether at their workplace or in their personal life.

If true, this is naïve, misguided and dangerous. Transparency applies to organizations, not people. Organizations are increasingly obliged to communicate pertinent information to their customers, shareholders, business partners and so on. This is not the case for individuals. Indeed, individual privacy is the foundation of a free society and individuals have an obligation to themselves to safeguard their personal information. And institutions should be transparent about what they do with our personal information.

“Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its hundreds of millions of users,” said FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz. “Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy.”

Given the company’s privacy-hostile DNA, it was only a matter of time before users started catching on and abandoning the company in droves. Thus, the FTC’s sanctions may have unwittingly helped the company survive. According to the proposed FTC settlement, Facebook is barred from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ personal information. It is required to obtain consumers’ affirmative consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences, and required to prevent anyone from accessing a user’s material no more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account.

In addition, the company is required to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program designed to address privacy risks associated with the development and management of new and existing products and services, and Facebook is required, within 180 days, and every two years after that for the next 20 years, to obtain independent, third-party audits certifying that it has a privacy program in place that meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order, and to ensure that the privacy of consumers’ information is protected.

On his blog, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the FTC settlement “means we’re making a clear and formal long-term commitment to do the things we’ve always tried to do and planned to keep doing — giving you tools to control who can see your information and then making sure only those people you intend can see it.”

Safeguarding privacy should be a fundamental element of all social media, not something tacked on as an afterthought.  As Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian says: “It’s all about being proactive and embedding the necessary protections into the design of your systems.  By doing so, you can prevent the privacy harm from arising, thereby avoiding the costs associated with data breaches.”

Cavoukian advocates Privacy by Design, a concept that has been embraced by privacy advocates around the world. Privacy by Design is about proactively embedding privacy into the design of technology and business practices, ideally as the default setting. It also emphasizes data minimization. A company should not collect, use or retain more personally identifiable data than it actually needs. This practice lowers the risk the risk of encountering data breaches, identity theft, and so on.

The lesson here is that companies need to protect the privacy of their customers and everyone else by designing it into the core of their business modus operandi.  Not everyone can count on the FTC to be their BFF.

PHOTO: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks to reporters at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts November 7, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder