Whose data is it anyway?
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Tue, Aug 17, 2010
Big organizations have a lot of fear concerning peoples' privacy, but book publisher, event organizer and industry luminary Tim O'Reilly thinks it's time to throw our old models out of the window and re look at privacy afresh. "The old model of privacy isn't taking into account any of the trade offs, and clearly people are willing to make those trade offs," he says. "Google maps on your phone sends your location to someone else's server every time you look something up, for example." O'Reilly's position on privacy is a very important one, at this point when the future of privacy is being debated.
O'Reilly says.
"Technology is taking us a direction where more and more is known about us. It’s hard to be completely anonymized. I think we need a complete fresh look at what trade offs we're making and why. A good example is health care privacy. It's true that there are some diseases that still have stigmas around them, but our need for privacy is mostly about adverse selection from insurance companies. The problem we need to solve is adverse selection due to pre-existing conditions, not to treat the info like it's toxic waste. If we look at the benefits of using the information - they are incredible.
"One thing we can do is look at places where people have given up a fair amount of privacy and feel ok about it. The financial arena is one of those places - it's ok to do data mining for fraud prevention.
What do you think?
- Should we as a society be sacrificing privacy for the sake of innovation and more relevant services?
- What is the role of Marketers, especially in India, where data privacy regulations are nascent or not there at all?
- Can Analytics play a role in uncovering more insight in the data and making the marketing more relevant thereby crowding out the irrelevant messages ?
- Should some industries lead the thinking on data privacy? After all Telecom services, Banks & Retail probably have the largest customer databases. Should Marketers in these businesses think ahead and establish “high ground” in how they treat their customer information?
- What about data sharing across industry- Co branded credit cards have used data across Retail , airline and other sectors to launch customized offerings? I Mint has done the same as a coalition loyalty program that has multiple participants-Banks , retailers, Airlines etc.
- How should the CTO/CIO think about this? What kind of customer privacy safeguards can be built into the technology roadmap?