The “kaamwali bai” test
Trading off privacy consciously and strategically has an upside
Vanita was a guest at my wedding. She knows many details about my family — my parents’ meal preferences, which part of my childhood home needs repairs, when my mother is behind schedule on the payment of our electricity bills and our impending travel plans. She does not live with us, yet she is a repository of detailed information about my family’s lifestyle. Vanita has been our household helper for two decades.
The “kaamwali bai” (pronounced as kaam — wally — baa— e)
The “kaamwali bai” is a quintessentially Indian institution. In India, where I grew up, every middle-class home has survived and thrived because of a “kaamwali bai”. She is a unique type of housekeeper who comes in early every morning to dust, sweep, mop, do dishes and sometimes laundry too. A daily visitor who goes into every nook and corner of the house, she gleans information that nobody else beyond the occupants of the house may have. For instance, she knows which beds were slept in, whether some one had a midnight treat and tucked away the wrapper in a corner, whether or not you eat organic, your favourite brand of lingerie and so on. Not that she intends to, it is just an occupational hazard. Moreover, the small sizes of suburban homes in metros such as Mumbai allow her to overhear conversation ranging from household finances to wedding plans. Over the years, she becomes an invisible but central part of the family and a database for gossip-worthy information on each of the dozen households she serves, who uses her vantage point to align her services to our tastes more and more accurately.
Doesn’t this sound much like our relationship with social media, our credit card companies, our phone company and all other data brokers who glean our private information? A few months back, I wrote an article about how opting out of data gathering services doesn’t serve its intended purpose. Any one of us is easily categorised into one of several, detailed psychological profiles that marketers build using data from people similar to us. In a nutshell, we are some linear combination of those around us, so there is no place to hide. However, is sharing our personal data really such a bad idea after all? Especially, since we have already been sharing it for generations with people who serve our families in various capacities.
Some unintended consequences can be beneficial
In the case of the kaamwali bai, do her employers know about their loss of privacy? Yes. Do we like it? Not really. Then why do we permit this dissemination of our personal information to happen? The reality is that we consider it as an inane cost for keeping the home clean. In fact, over the years, families entrust more and more responsibility to a loyal kaamwali bai, such as checking on the house when they travel for long periods, running errands, dropping off bill-payments (in the pre-online payments era), transporting little items from one of the households where she works to another and so on. Such loss of privacy is one of the unintended consequences of an otherwise beneficial arrangement. The kaamwali bai is the easiest and a fairly reliable way to outsource all your exhausting domestic chores. We simply cannot imagine surviving without her services.
The primary fear in such a loss of privacy to companies we transact with is psychological targeting. We do not want another Cambridge Analytica to use our data to manipulate us into doing things we would never do in our right minds. Columbia University Professor Sandra Matz explains really well in her TEDx talk how pyschological targeting works and how scarily effective it is.
Yet, I’d argue that we stand to benefit from trading-off some level of privacy for economic value, improvement in lifestyle, health and perhaps even safety. Big data analytics make possible the personalised recommendations for well-curated goods and services that we so value. I recently found out about a subcription box of high quality, developmentally appropriate activities for my children through a Facebook ad. I’m a happy customer of theirs for over a year now. And since I purchased KiwiCo, I have been receiving information about other such interesting educational pages or products. Yet, it is also true that Facebook probably knows by now that I have a four and a two year old, that I prefer hands-on activities and that I’m also somewhat price insensitive to educational goods but may be extremely cynical about kids’ fashion accessories and so on. Similar to the case of the kaamwali bai, I have made a conscious, strategic decision to let some of my data escape in return for concrete value.
The kaamwali bai test
As adults who participate actively in the data economy, we all share information strategically through the various transactions we engage in, commercial and non-commercial. Unless we withdraw completely from this info-technology driven world and take to the Himalayas (or the Rockies), there is no escape. That is why it is even more crucial to be conscious about what we choose to share about our lives. We should be sharing data strategically in return for commensurate value.
To do so, we could use this analogy of the kaamwali bai. While our kaamwali bai is no machine learning expert, she is still a useful litmus test in assessing whether or not to share a particular piece of personal information. The next time you are about to sign up for a new service, stop for a second and ask yourself this question — would I, as a reasonable adult, be okay if my kaamwali bai became aware of this transaction or any incidental details I am about to share through this transaction? The second question we should ask is — do the entities I am about to transact with have a strong enough incentive to maintain a long-term relationship with me? The reason why a kaamwali bai would not misuse any information she has come to know is because each household represents a stream of future income at stake. Similarly, Facebook may or may not care much whether a single person closes their account, however, your subscription-based music service or your local pharmacy probably cares more because of your lifetime value to them.
In a nutshell
The key idea is to allow sharing of personal data but consciously and strategically. Engaging in the data economy in this measured manner would allow us to benefit from the potentially large upside of data-sharing. Beyond manipulating customers into buying more material goods, data analytics is also used to encourage healthy habits such as saving regularly and eating healthy. Data sharing with relatively reliable entities not only makes our lives better but it can in fact, be life-saving. Remember, Google which tracks your location wherever you go, can be annoying but it can also be a blessing if you were stranded in a remote part of the world.
Who is one person who you have been sharing quirky, personal information with knowingly or unknowingly? Please share your thoughts in comments below!
