How often have you given away your contact details for getting that 20% discount on your purchase? And did you ever hesitate while doing so?
What happened here is that you paid part of your purchase by replacing real currency with your personal information. And while this has existed for quite a while now, personal data is becoming more relevant than ever in this day and age; it’s becoming a currency of its own.
The equation looks simple: you give a company your data and you get something in return. The question, however, is: are they offering you a fair price?
In my opinion, there needs to be a tangible value attributed to data. For this calculation, several factors should to be taken into consideration, e.g. the nature of the data, the reason for collecting it, or the company’s efforts in reducing the risks of it being misused or stolen. Since people’s data is already a valuable asset for corporations such as Google or Facebook, this idea doesn’t seem to be too far-fetched.
On this subject, a London artist set up a social experiment. People could – only – pay for his products with their own personal data. Have a look at this experiment in this short video:
So, what will the consequences look like once we’re more aware of the fact that we can ‘pay’ with our data because we are able to understand the actual value of it (measured in real currency prices)?
If you ask me, the following will happen:
It will strengthen the power of firms who are in possession of critical user data. Also, it will facilitate the creation of new business models & more importantly, help to monetize them. The general public will hopefully become more careful with giving away their data. Either way, legislation will need to protect the users more than ever before – the GDPR was one crucial, first step.
How do you handle the trade with personal data? Have you ever wondered what big corporations know about you? And would you want to know the Euro-value of your data?
Sources:
https://iapp.org/news/a/why-you-need-to-protect-personal-data-like-its-currency/
https://www.cio.com/article/3224533/data-management/is-data-the-currency-of-the-future.html
http://www.scenariomagazine.com/is-your-personal-data-a-currency/
I think that article and especially that experiment are very interesting. I was always somehow aware that companies make money with my personal data, but I actually have never considered the possibility that we could turn our data into actual value for ourselves in the form of money. To me that also seems to be a fair approach, as most of the time you are giving out your data and you are not even getting something in return as the 20% discount on your purchase. For example, companies like Google and Facebook store every interaction of us within these platforms. From that they are eventually able to create an advertisement profile based on our information as gender, age, interests, income etc. And as we have seen with Facebook in the beginning of the year, these companies share this data with third parties to use for their own advertising purposes.
I also think that the GDPR was an important step to create awareness about the own data protection, but after all to be able to utilize many websites and platforms you are “forced” to accept the terms even though you might not agree with them. So, I believe that it is still necessary to create more awareness about this issue and an approach to put a tangible attribute to data could be a potential tool to do so. But it would be very difficult to actually determine a fair approach to value the data in the form of Euro-value.