The WhatsApp Debate signals the emergence of a new digital era

This decade is likely to see the emergence of online new consumer experiences that spins off from two consumer trends. The first centres around the need for stronger control over user privacy. Second, the consumer's willingness to pay for their online experiences. There has been much debate and chatter around the new privacy policies and data privacy in general. I think we should look at this in two balanced perspectives.

From a business perspective, business models of Facebook or Google still largely hinge on advertising and efficacy of advertising. They monetize their services around organising information or connecting people largely through advertising. As these businesses evolved, their value proposition became increasingly intertwined to evolving their advertising products used by businesses and individuals. Over the decades, Facebook and Google have worked themselves into a position of having a disproportionately large market share of the online advertising industry. So they are actually operating in an industry of advertising, not social networking; or for that matter organising information. Advertising is the core of these businesses.

So these businesses have been constantly looking at ways to make their products more attractive for advertising intent. Right now the product focus appears to be in gaining a deeper understanding of user intent to build superior advertising products.

Users on other hand, obviously have choices.

It's about weighing in value, privacy and price. This is really not a question of trust or misuse of trust if we dwell deeper into this issue.

First things first. If you want to use something for free forever, the SNS will use your data to offer paid services to someone else. In essence, you are a part of the product or pretty much the product. Depending on the need or understanding of privacy, you should either opt to choose services with a small fee for or choose to be the product itself. Like in the case of every technology generation, there is always a new solution for every problem and a new problem for every solution!

In this new era, we are already seeing an emergence of pure-play search engines. For eg, duckduckgo, whose simpler advertising business model (currently) does not need to chase a customer using cookies and biscuits. There is also the emergence of Signal and Telegram whose business models are likely a balanced combination of freemium services (paid after a certain threshold) with some minor play in less intrusive advertising space.

Amazon for instance also knows it's users extremely well. But the core business model is very evident with their paid offerings to both consumers and businesses. That makes it evidently less cryptic for both consumers and businesses to know how it treats their data.

These are interesting digital times and there is a lot of 'food for digital thoughts' there to be consumed.

Ashwin Shivakumar, CEO, JugularSocial Group