Three months ago Google was ordered by the French, and other European governments, to make changes to its revised Privacy Policy, which it introduced in March 2012. This allows Google to combine users’ information across multiple Google services. Many users and consumer and privacy groups protested, and a number of European governments ruled that the new policies and practices were illegal with re... »
The opening line of Charles Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities” neatly captures the tenor of the current turmoil in the world of personal data. Or, as the Chinese curse says: “may you live in interesting times”… and we certainly live in interesting times. Hardly a day passes without, on the one hand, news of novel, imaginative and clever ways of using personal data, and on the other hand, tales of dat... »
The murmur of debate and discussion concerning the proper use, and increasing abuse, of their citizens’ personal data by governments has risen to a crescendo since the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US’s NSA PRISM and the UK’s GCHQ Tempora programmes were publicied by the Guardian in June 2013. Alongside that there has been a steady stream of continued exposure of the way in which... »
In a previous post I argued that trust was a central and massively important part of what is involved in being human, and social, and living a good life. And I’m aware that that sounds terribly soft and earnest and, in these cynical times, hopelessly naïve. So I’ve been looking at what economists, often a pretty hard-nosed and unromantic lot, have to say about trust. It turns out that what they ha... »
In previous posts we’ve noted that when new technologies are introduced it often takes people time to work out the social rules that need to be used to tame and domesticate the raw technology. The mobile phone is a good example of that: just because it is possible to make and receive calls anywhere, at any time, doesn’t mean that we want or have to allow people to do that. So in the few years sinc... »
An interesting article by Adam Tanner on the Forbes website in which he traces where one particular piece of junk mail came from. Tanner is a fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Government and is writing a book on the business of personal data. He’s looking for answers to questions such as who are the people and firms gathering such information? What details are they putting together, how... »
The propositions that Handshake is built upon seem quite simple in principle (see Duncan White’s “What is Handshake” post? ): 1: information is valuable 2: there are people who have information, such as their personal data, and there are people who want that information, such as advertisers, analysts and businesses of all kinds 3: both people can benefit if they can work out a mutually acceptable ... »
Trust is a little word, but it deals with some very big issues, from what it means to be human to the wealth of nations. And it’s time that business took it seriously. Graham Greene, the English novelist and playwright, perhaps summed it up most concisely: “It is impossible to go through life without trust: to do so is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself” From the moment we are born... »
As we noted in our previous post about personalised pricing, at the moment it’s thought that businesses are only just beginning to experiment with individualised pricing based on analysis of their customers personal data. But at the moment no-one knows a great deal about what exactly is happening. In November 2012 the UK’s Office of Fair Trading issued a “call for information” asking businesses to... »
I’m writing this in two parts, here’s the first one. The second part will address some of the scarier things associated with personalised pricing, e.g. exploiting a person’s vulnerabilities to set prices and/or T’s & C’s. Let’s first consider the context. What’s in a Name? In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare claims that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”... »
