Empowering Users to Control Their Personal Data
A User-driven Solution To The Data Privacy Debate
Data is the New Oil
IBM estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day. Furthermore, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last 2 years. The explosion in data shows no signs of slowing down. It is estimated that by 2020 our accumulated digital universe will grow from 4.4 zettabytes today to around 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes.
A significant portion of the accumulated data is personal data, i.e. derived from user input, behaviour, and interactions. This includes contact information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction to name a few.
According to the Economist, the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. The data in its aggregate form is clearly valuable. Tech empires are built on the premise of turning data into information and ultimately insights that can be exploited.
The Privacy Paradox in the Internet Era
There has been a shift in the attitude towards privacy/data sharing among internet users. Despite the increase in large-scale data breaches and data collection by companies, the average user does not seem to care much about what and with whom they share their personal information with as well as how the data is used.
Maybe social media has changed our attitude towards sharing personal information. Or we have simply accepted the fact that if we are not paying for a product we may be the product. Or maybe we trust organisations to not misuse our personal data. It may also be because most of us do not experience any negative consequences of sharing our personal information. When someone steals your phone, you care— but if companies collect your email address, location history, name, and date of birth, you will most likely get more junk email/targeted ads.
It may also be that users simply are not informed about what they share as the process is not transparent and/or it happens over time, so users do not perceive themselves to be oversharing. According to HBR, while users are broadly aware that companies collect data on them, they are surprisingly uninformed about the specific types of data they give up when they go online.
Step-by-Step Approach to Empowering Individuals to Own Their Digital Footprint
Any change in the status quo requires (a) regulatory pressures on companies to ensure data privacy and (b) a fundamental shift in user’s attitude towards their own personal data in the internet era. Users need to (1) precisely understand what they share and with which companies and (2) have the power to manage their personal data.
Therefore, a potential solution could be twofold:
(1) Your Digital Identity Dashboard—Increasing Awareness
“You don’t know what you don’t know”
Users need to be made aware of what information they share with companies. Google already has a privacy dashboard and Facebook is reportedly rolling out a ‘privacy centre’ in response to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). What about all the newsletters you signed up for or the Myspace account you never closed? Based on anecdotal experience, we share our personal data with a lot more companies (online and offline) than the tech giants.
Therefore, there is a need for a digital dashboard which crawls all your interactions with companies (similar to unroll.me) and gathers the amount of personal information (name, email, address, phone number, location history etc) shared. The dashboard would enable continuous monitoring of a user’s digital footprint. I think that it could simply shock the average user by visually displaying how many companies they share their personal information with.
(2) Unified Digital Management Platform — Empowering users to control their personal data by leveraging GDPR
Once the users (are shocked and) have the ability to monitor their digital footprint across platforms, they will hopefully become more privacy-conscious. The next step is to enable users to actively manage their personal data. Thanks to the upcoming GDPR regulation in the EU, European citizens will be able to request all the information companies have on them as well as get companies to delete their details from their records.
However, this is not very straightforward and requires a lot of knowledge about the process that the average user does not have and/or not care to acquire.
There is a potential for a platform to act as an intermediary and enable users to manage their personal identity (data) online. The platform would automatically contact companies on behalf of the user and identify:
- What minimum level of data do companies need in order to deliver the service Vs. what they collect? According to HBR, “it’s also not unusual for companies to quietly collect personal data they have no immediate use for, reasoning that it might be valuable someday.
- Ask companies with which the user had no recent interaction or companies which have excessive data to delete appropriately.
Promising Approach in a Nascent Sector
The personal digital management space is currently at a very early stage with only a handful of players in the market. Given the rise of digital monopolies, which harness user data, I expect that it will grow exponentially in the future.
An interesting startup that is taking it in the right direction is Digi.me, a UK-based personal identity management platform. It enables users to gather data from social media platforms and other services and share it with businesses in a mutually beneficial value exchange.
A word of caution — Another start-up, Personal.com (acquired by Digi.me in 2017) faced significant challenges in implementing its initial B2C business model, simply because it is quite hard to get consumers to pay for something that they do not perceive as a pain point. That’s why it is important to make people aware of the kind of data they share first and then help them manage it. Highlight the pain point before you charge for a solution!
Conclusion
There is no question that data is the new fuel of the digital economy. Sharing data can be beneficial for users as they receive free services (Facebook, Google) and more targeted ads. However, users need to be in a position to manage their digital identity/footprint themselves. Whilst a lot of people may not currently care who owns the data, they deserve to understand what companies know about them and retract data if they deem necessary (now or in the future).
