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Ten years after the launch of Foursquare location services company at the SXSW festival in Austin, co-founder Dennis Crowley is back at this year's conference with a message for the rest of Silicon Valley: beware you Washington, because the tide starts to turn around, collecting data contrary to ethics.
Crowley yesterday announced a Austin-specific demonstration of an anonymized location tracking feature for Foursquare called Hypertrending. Today, in a morning discussion of SXSW, Crowley touched on difficult issues around ethics, privacy, data collection and regulation, thanks in large part to the continued encouragement of CNN's Laurie Segall. According to Crowley, companies such as Google and Facebook, along with thousands of smaller, less recommendable collectors and data brokers, will be taken into account by potential regulatory changes and a dramatic change in technology. Public attitude to ad targeting and data privacy.
"We think a lot about future legislation, especially for location technologies," says Crowley. "There is a spectrum for this kind of thing. There are apps that collect a ton of site, even about individuals, and sell it to anyone. And these are probably companies you have never heard of and do not want you to know their name. "
Even for big giants like Facebook and Google, Crowley said there is room to debate whether ad-based and data-hungry business models that support the most popular technology the planet are sustainable. "You can certainly argue that companies have gone too far in collecting everything and making you a little nugget of value," Crowley said. "Who makes the most of Facebook? Do I use it for free or do I pay $ 5 a month or $ 10 a month? I think that when many of these products begin to be understood by consumers in general, there will be a movement towards these products. [paid] experiences in the future. "
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) announced her intention to try to dismantle Amazon, Google and Facebook, which happened just a day after the staggering announcement of Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, according to which his company's privacy-oriented communication platform prioritizes encryption and ephemeral messaging. But both events have had a significant impact on this year's SXSW theme. And this theme is already emerging in the form of a tough debate about how technology companies will react and change now that Washington and the public are starting to reject the dominant business models of Silicon Valley.
Crowley often avoided criticizing Google or Facebook directly. he sold his first startup, Dodgeball, to Google (an experience he calls nonetheless "not super fun") and says he has "great respect" for what both companies have built. But sometimes he was willing to express direct challenges to the ethical positions of these companies. "Google has a map of the world and Facebook has a map of the world and Apple has a map of the world," said Crowley, referring to the current role of Foursquare as a provider of location services for businesses. "Many companies do not want to work with Google, Facebook or Apple because they try to bankrupt them. Someone wants a data provider, but not one of the big three. "
Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare and former CEO for seven years before handing over to current CEO Jeff Glueck, is one of the few technical executives to be able to talk about data collection without fear of being called a hypocrite. As Glueck says The edge In a recent interview, Foursquare refuses to sell customer data, despite multiple multi-million dollar deals from large companies that want to access users' real-world habits.
In fact, you could argue that Foursquare, which still employs about 300 people, has not been able to expand to other social networks in part because of its approach to data privacy. Crowley has always made Foursquare's location features transparent and optional, and the localization platform it now provides to other companies uses only aggregated and anonymized data.
Naturally, this approach has not always been successful for Foursquare, especially since competing companies like Facebook and Google have integrated localization features and created customized ads targeting the backbone of the modern Web. Over the years, Foursquare has moved away from mainstream applications to business enterprise products to enable them to use large, aggregated sites. As a result, the company separated the original Foursquare into Swarm and City Guides about five years ago. Consumers have largely abandoned both because the concept of registration has lost its appeal.
This places Crowley in the unique position of being able to criticize its technology colleagues for creating a culture of industry that devalues user privacy and prioritizes data collection at all costs. "There are always requests like" Hey Foursquare, can you give me all your data and we can ingest them and see how to use them? Crowley explains, "No, that's not our purpose, if at some point we do something bad, disrespectful or unresponsive, users call you and employees call you." can look at the lessons that Twitter, Facebook and others struggle with and say, "Let's do the opposite of what we do."
Nevertheless, as a provider of localization services for everyone, from Uber, from Twitter to Samsung, via Snapchat, Foursquare occupies an uncomfortable place in an industry that regularly flouts the ethical practices of privacy and confidentiality. data collection. As The New York Times According to a survey conducted last December, the market for advertising based on location data lacking mobile apps and native services on smartphones jumped to $ 21 billion. And, as the report makes clear, this market is a largely unknown sector of technology and marketing economies, with companies failing to disclose what they do or how often they are collected.
Crowley is optimistic that, regardless of regulatory changes, companies like Foursquare will be able to promote more ethical data collection. "We are going to have the opportunity to go to Washington and say that's what's right and what's wrong," he says. "Ten years after the launch of Foursquare, we have the opportunity to shape the future. We are invited to these rooms to help people understand what the law should be passed to determine what the law should be. This is a great opportunity. "
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