{"id":210125,"date":"2015-06-12T13:55:05","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T20:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cxcafe.maritzcx.com\/the-sorcerers-apprentice-generation\/"},"modified":"2015-06-12T13:57:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T20:57:27","slug":"the-sorcerers-apprentice-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/the-sorcerers-apprentice-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I don\u2019t care what companies know about me, I\u2019m really not that interesting.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is what Nina, my 20-something running friend, mentioned the other day on one of our longer jaunts. She went on to say if someone really wanted to know what she read, listened to, or even her location, she really didn\u2019t care, especially if she benefited from it somehow.<\/p>\n

This kind of blew my mind, since while I am not particularly guarded about myself, many of my 40-something friends have quite the opposite attitude. They get angry about unsolicited emails, they refuse to post pictures of their kids on Facebook or Instagram, and some abstain completely from social media, summarily dismissing the whole business as\u00a0a \u201cwaste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before you write some of my Gen X brethren off\u00a0as hopeless Luddites, consider my parents\u2019 generation. Gen Xers\u2019 attitudes about personal information sharing are a faint echo of the strident privacy paranoia of the \u201cSilent Generation.\u201d I remember as a child not getting discounted school lunch vouchers, not because our family didn\u2019t qualify or we didn\u2019t need them, but because then people would know about our economic situation by the color of my lunch ticket<\/em>. Not good in a small town. My parents would fret about\u00a0someone learning about out how much they paid for their house, their age or, god forbid, their annual income. That was and continues to be taboo topic for them. \u00a0I decided not to send them into a tailspin\u00a0by showing them\u00a0Zillow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It turns out, there are major attitudinal differences among generations in regard to privacy and information sharing. Millennials and the newer cohort of \u201cPlurals\u201d (those age 18-22) are much more open to sharing their information. In a recent MaritzCX G-Tailing Poll<\/a> among a national representative sample of 1,400 Americans, we found that nearly 40% of Plurals agreed with my friend Nina and didn\u2019t care about who saw their information as long as they got something of benefit in return. Only 1 in 4 of the older Boomer cohort agreed with the same statement.<\/p>\n

Millennials and Plurals have been conditioned to this informational quid pro quo\u00a0<\/em>through online interactions with all sorts of \u201cfree\u201d services. In short, many are comfortable \u201cbeing the product<\/a>\u201d as long as the aforementioned product gets something in return.<\/p>\n