Who owns my personal info?
CNET News brings us a “startling” new idea from Harvard Business School professor John Deighton: People should be able to profit from their personal information.
Selling your personal data
It’s a startling idea: Instead of relying on regulators to protect our privacy against telemarketers, data miners and consumer companies, we should capitalize on the value of our personal information and get something in return.
This doesn’t strike me as a startling idea at all. In fact, I’ve long thought this should be the case. The problem as I see it, though, is that information about an individual isn’t particularly valuable until it is aggregated and viewed in the context of a much larger set of data.
Suppose, for example, that my personal information is worth $1.00 to a large number of companies. It’s not really worth my time to contact each of those companies just for a dollar. Indeed, I would have to contact at least one new company every minute to make it even marginally worthwhile. Likewise, it is not going to be worth much more than one dollar for most of those companies to acquire my personal information. For many of them, my information would probably be worth a lot less than a dollar.
What is needed to make Professor Deighton’s idea work is a way for individuals to manage their personal information in a very detailed way. The infrastructure for such a system doesn’t really exist yet, but the idea is not beyond our imagination. Such an idea, if promoted as a means of giving people more control over what is known about them (rather than giving the government more control over people’s lives, as is the case with many current mass-awareness initiatives, like Total Terrorist Information Awareness), it might not meet as much public resistance as TIA-like schemes. One could even imagine occupations springing up around the practice. Personal information agents or data brokers could join the ranks of professionals who deal in providing insurance or managing investment portfolios.
Putting the right to control this information back in the hands of consumers would be a good thing, although I can envision situations where such information might be abused. Actually, it provides some inspiration for a story along the lines of something Philip K. Dick might have written. If only I had some time to write!
