My next panel was Demystifying Online Privacy and Empowering the Digital Self with Marc Davis from Microsoft, Nick Goggans from Umbel, Paul Krasinski from Arbitron

This is a topic I’m laser-focused on right now. We’re essentially living in a post-social-media world (all media is social), so in my opinion, marketers need to start looking well beyond the Facebooking and Tweets. One area I think we need to focus upon is privacy.

It’s been a slippery slope on how much we share and devolution of privacy, and that’s largely because of the way technology has shaped our culture.

In the 1960s, all data was on the mainstream in the cloud. In the 1980s and 90s, all data was local on PCs. Now data lives in the cloud… but also on your computer… but also on your phone… and also in many places you don’t even realize.

In the mid-90s, you had a web of pages — documents with links. Today we have a web of people. In the world of Facebook, we have people who live online with a persistent identity. This is a part of the infrastructure of today’s web, and it’s reflective of our emerging, privacy-shrugging culture.

But we’re also moving to a web of the world where we’re connected with people across the globe who have an identity that lives online. Even events have identities, like hurricanes, earthquakes and events like SXSW. For example, this very panel right now. Our cell carriers know we’re here in Austin. My social network friends know I’m here, that I checked in on FourSquare, that I tweeted, my RSVP’s on the SXSW Calendar, etc.

Through mobile social, web of people and web of the world has turned out web of interests and activity from being invisible and private to public and impersonal. I don’t even think twice about sharing this information, but should I? And who is scraping my data, storing it, and do I trust them?

Krasinski says Internet advertising 10 years ago was like television advertising. But today’s world isn’t even about targeting an individual; what’s really powerful is the notion about building a relationship about a person between a brand and individual. A large amount of data — whether the individual knows they’re giving it up or not — allows brands to start moving from impression-based advertising to qualified lead generation which has a higher rate of return. However, I would argue consumers don’t have control, or know they have control, over giving this data to build this relationship. We’re in an era of digital illiteracy. Not many people understand the data-driven world we live in, so they certainly don’t know how to take action or take control. It’s chaos.

Davis is optimistic about the transition from chaos to orderly data. Krasinski says there will be a return to localism in media consumption, which puts the effort on the content providers to stay relevant. Goggans says economics can now be made on a value trade and that evolves advertising from an interrupt to a value-exchange.

Davis has a great metaphor for where we’re at today based on the concept that we’re in an era of digital feudalism. It may as well be 1111, not 2011, he says. We don’t own our names. We don’t own our bodies. Our labor goes to the lords of the manor, and they war against each other.

What shaped our culture in the 18th century were things like human rights, freedom of assembly, free speech, etc. and when you look at the web, those rights don’t carry through. We don’t recognize our fundamental cultural milestones in this emerging technological landscape.

If you go back to the point that the data knows I’m here in Austin, then who owns the record of the fact that I’m here right now? Certainly not me, the individual.

Davis says what’s needed is a partnership between government and industry on who owns this data in sum. He says if you put people in control of their own information, the ability to aggregate and control this data makes the system work better. The panelists all agree the economics are actually better when you give the public control over their own data.

Davis says the hard part is that our society today is based on property rights. You buy a good and can sell a good. But data privacy is difficult to imagine, let alone manage. To that end, Davis says the decisions in the next 3-10 years made about data and privacy will impact our society forever.

Unfortunately, the panelists agreed there is no specific answer. I guess we’ll see in the next 3-10 years.