By Terri Wu
A New York-based social media startup is in search of to set itself aside from mainstream tech practices by taking a strict stance on information privateness.
The corporate is a minimalist in terms of information assortment, in response to Nick Janicki, director of media relations at Gan Jing World, an leisure platform established in the US final July by former Silicon Valley executives.
Gan Jing’s dedication begins with permitting using its app with out a registered account. This function was enabled final month. Liking or sharing a video doesn’t require registration, both. Commenting on a video, nonetheless, would require an account for sustaining neighborhood pointers. Even for that, Gan Jing is exploring different technical options to carry the requirement, mentioned Janicki, including that the startup solely collects information to satisfy authorized necessities and important performance wants, akin to an electronic mail tackle to verify registration.
“Gan Jing World doesn’t gather customers’ data nor tracks customers after they depart the location or app,” Janicki instructed The Epoch Occasions. “Monitoring customers throughout the Web shouldn’t be being carried out in any respect, which is de facto vital.”
He mentioned Gan Jing, which implies clear, treats shoppers as learners quite than finish merchandise—it permits customers to arrange preferences for the algorithm to work of their favor: information self-improvement in a clear leisure freed from violent, erotic, felony, and dangerous content material.
Treating customers as finish merchandise has a direct influence on information privateness as a result of corporations personal the information of their finish merchandise, in response to Janicki, who says privateness is extra vital than ever now, as synthetic intelligence might take privateness intrusion to an all-new stage by mining private information at unprecedented energy and velocity.
When person information is the top product, which means the privateness is up on the market, together with opened and browse emails, drugstore purchases, location information, contacts, texting habits, and extra.
Gan Jing’s Approach to Advertising
How can advertising work without personal data? Gan Jing wants to go back to traditional advertising, where demographic data was collected through voluntary survey responses and wasn’t tied to individual identities, according to Janicki.
He added that precision targeting based on personal data is overrated because the targeted individual is usually culturally invisible, and therefore, the context is missing; and precision targeting may incur the risk of over-optimizing into a suboptimal situation. And Gan Jing believes in ad targeting—age, sex, geographical, interest, and more—on an aggregated level without capturing individual identity, he said.
“There’s still some data capture that allows for things like recommendations,” said Janicki. “But Gan Jing doesn’t continue to track you when you leave the site or app, and your data isn’t being sold as an individual to advertisers. I think those are the two biggest differentiators of Gan Jing.”
He said for now, Gan Jing can only control its own environment and invite partners to build an ecosystem that protects data privacy. However, a user may still experience ad targeting if an advertiser does data matching on its own and targets the user somewhere else on the Internet. However, with more partners joining hands, a new ecosystem that respects users’ privacy can form, he added.
