The daily deluge of news stories about the use and abuse of personal data continues. Led by the US and UK governments, government-intelligence coalitions seem to have adopted the position that it’s ok to trash citizens’ rights to privacy and security because a) we shouldn’t have been surprised that they were doing this, because b) they’ve been doing it for a long time and c) and everybody else is ... »
One of the obvious existing “information markets” is the world of consumer loyalty schemes. Major loyalty schemes, such as those of Boots, Tesco, and the multi-retailer Nectar scheme are explicitly exchanging points for information. Whilst few people know what a point is actually worth (and that’s because it’s not easy to know, but that’s another story) a lot of people seem to think that giving de... »
Fascinating debate in the online version of the Guardian on Saturday (2013-10-12) under the title “Spooks and secrets: what is the public’s right to know?”. In it, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of the British civil liberties advocacy organisation Liberty, and ex-MI6 officer Nigel Inkster debated the rights and wrongs of exposing the activities of the UK and US security and intelligence ser... »
The issue of privacy, or more generally and accurately the issue of who owns what data, and the rights and obligations associated with the use of that data have clearly shot up the public agenda. A term that a few years ago would have been associated with what you could and couldn’t do or say in your own home is now the topic of daily discussion in the context of Google, Facebook, the NSA and GCHQ... »
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... »
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... »
In the TED talk, ‘What physics taught me about marketing’, Dan Cobley, a marketing director at Google, speaks about the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. In a nutshell, this means that it’s impossible to exactly measure the position and momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring changes them. Dan’s “marketing takeaway” from this was that we should measure what consumers actua... »
