Privacy: Getting Some Perspective

Who'd want to live here?

Privacy means different things to different people. It exists on a sliding scale, shaped by our experiences, values, and contexts.

Take consent management banners—the pop-ups that ask whether you’re happy to accept cookies. They’re meant to give users more control over the data that’s collected about them. For most of us, the data in question is anonymous. Even skilled digital analysts can’t typically identify individuals by name. But that doesn’t mean the data is without power—companies like Google and Facebook use it to build profiles and target ads, often with uncanny relevance.

If you live alone, those ads might feel more helpful than invasive. But if you share a device, things get awkward fast—especially if the products being advertised are things you’d rather your partner, kids, or housemates didn’t see.

Still, even that kind of digital privacy breach isn’t quite as mortifying as some of the offline equivalents.

Imagine being locked out of your house with no clothes on. Embarrassing, yes—but let’s go one step further.

Now imagine being made to live for six months in a ground-floor flat on a busy high street, in winter, with no curtains. Every choice you make—what you wear, how you move, what you eat—is potentially on display. Your options? Live in darkness, or live exposed. Think about what that kind of visibility would do to you over time.

That’s the kind of perspective we need when we talk about privacy in digital analytics.

Online, there’s a value exchange happening. We give up fragments of our data in return for free access to services, content, and convenience. And for the most part, that’s where many privacy debates start and end.

But it’s also worth remembering that good privacy hygiene isn’t just about cookies. It’s about habits—using two-factor authentication, being skeptical of suspicious links, and thinking twice before handing over information. Accepting cookies is low on the threat scale compared to having your email compromised or falling for a phishing scam.

Let’s also remember that the value exchange tied to consent banners isn’t as polarising as we might think. The data we share can be used to benefit not only the organisations we visit but also ourselves. As digital professionals, we live and breathe this stuff, but outside our small corner of society, billions of people hold potentially different views. Our perspectives might not be as universal as we assume, and it’s important to approach privacy with empathy for a wider range of experiences, value sets and ethical principles.

So yes, privacy matters (see article 12 of the Declaration of Human Rights) and yes we must be conscious of it and ever vigilant when configuring our consent banners. And yes behavioural profiling data can be abused, but let's keep a balanced perspective in context of the data value exchange.