How much is digital privacy worth to you? I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that if you had to put a price tag on your privacy—as in, how many actual dollars you’d be willing to part with in order to make sure that Big Tech can’t collect any data on you—that price tag would be pretty close to zero. Even the very concerned wonks at The Atlantic admit it: “Privacy” is abstract, confusing, and hard to sell to regular people who may have heard that “surveillance capitalism” is totes not cool, but still use Gmail and smartphones anyway.
Which is why the makers of Winston aren’t bothering to try. Instead, they’re embracing the fact that, at least for now, simply caring about “the privacy problem” denotes privilege—and the best way to sell a solution is as a luxury good. Winston’s CEO, Richard Stokes, uses the word “premium product,” but what else would you call an “online privacy device” that costs $250 retail (plus $99 per year in ongoing software subscription fees)?
“I definitely think status plays a part,” Stokes says.
Tech-wise, Winston uses peer-to-peer networking to anonymize your online activity and throw a wireless privacy cloak over any connected device within its reach. But design-wise, Winston’s job is to look expensive and important—and conspicuously cast that halo around its owner. “I thought people would just put it in the closet, but in our field trials, 76% of our users said they put Winston out in the open,” says Stokes. “It’s like a badge of honor.”
Winston isn’t the first company to lean into this approach toward selling digital privacy. Home-server startup Helm clads its head-scratcher of a value proposition—hide your email and calendar data from Google by . . . hosting it all yourself!—in a distractingly gorgeous outer case and double-take-inducing $500 price tag. It’s the same strategy that Tesla started with: Instead of trying to get the whole world to care about renewable energy, just get rich techies to buy an awesome-looking electric car.
To his credit, Stokes knows that Winston’s Tesla-esque design strategy can only take them so far. “Our ultimate goal is to get at least 10% penetration in the U.S. market, and you’re not going to do that being a niche, ultra-premium privacy product,” he says. “But as a startup, we have to iterate really quickly. And so we say, ‘Look, the more early adopters we can get who are really invested in this, the more feedback we’re gonna get, and the faster we can make this thing awesome.” In the future, data privacy—like climate change—may be something that regular people are willing to vote on with their dollars. But to survive until then, companies like Winston have to start somewhere. Designing for conspicuous consumption may make us roll our eyes, but it may also get the ball rolling where we want it to go.