"Free" isn't really free

... at least when it comes to consuming services online these days. The latest Facebook gaff (changing everyone's primary address to your.name@facebook.com) shouldn't really come as much of a surprise and absolutely shouldn't piss anyone off.

Yes it's boneheaded, but we are in an age we we're willing to trade privacy and personal information about ourselves for a service or convenience. I love and use Google's "free" services (gmail, calendar, tasks) on a daily basis. And I do this with the knowledge that I'm giving Google more and more information about my personal life, who I communicate with, what I do with my time, and even where I am on every day. But I'm ok with it. If I occasionally see an ad that's so targeted it strikes me as almost eery, they're just doing their job.

As consumers, we're not really Google's customers. The advertisers are. We and the data Google, Facebook, and all of their cohorts have about our behavior are. If you don't want to see targeted ads or have Facebook muck with your profile, get yourself offline. Online privacy is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

A Reminder That People Are People

There's a phenomenon that has bothered me since early on at my first job out of college. We (I can fall into the trap of being guilty as well) tend to dehumanize people by calling them "users", "customers", "resources" or something other than people. I think that it's particularly pervasive within I.T., but it definitely shows up in other departments as well.

I can't stand it.

Firstly, it just sounds ridiculous. "I've got some resources on my team which would be valuable on this project" is something I heard often during my tenure in a huge, corporate IT department. It's borderline offensive. How about "Steve is a rockstar developer who really understands the framework you're proposing to use. He might be a huge help." It's just so much more human.

Secondly, it puts us in a terrible mindframe. If people are just cogs in a machine, we're biased toward thinking that they'll simply just behave rationally and predictably. This couldn't be further from the truth, particularly when we're talking about building things for end users. Expecting them to intuitively understand the assumptions we made and built into our solutions is crazy. In a very current example for me, customers interacting with an online ordering site do not think about the process of ordering pizza the same way an engineer designing that site does. They don't care how hard it is to map out a delivery zone or to figure out which is the optimal location to pick up from. They just want to type in their address and have it magically appear.

So I'm pleading with you. Don't abstract away the fact that we deal with messy, irrational, and unpredictable people every day. It'll help us make better decisions and besides - it's what keeps things interesting.