Personal data presents a “privacy paradox,” where users’ concerns aren’t reflected in their behaviors. We need “digital agency” — the ability to own the rights to their personal data, manage access to this data and, potentially, be compensated fairly for such access. Why don’t users care enough to take actions that match their concerns? What are the possible solutions? Why is this so difficult?
Why is data governance so hard?
Data, unlike other forms of personal property, is just plain complicated. Any workable solution would need to manage the following 10-point checklist at a minimum:
- Define what constitutes the personal data to which a user has exclusive rights.
- Establish criteria to demarcate personal data, anonymized data and third-party data.
- Create a transparent — market based — and universally accepted system of valuing data and compensating users accordingly for trading data.
- Define standards for how the data is stored, moved, or accessed inter-operably across different digital platforms.
- Establish criteria to evaluate the tradeoffs between many needs: inter-operability, privacy, cybersecurity.
- Establish criteria to evaluate the trade-offs between personal data and the use of aggregated data as a “public good”
- Mitigate the transactions costs of negotiating with multiple parties whenever a platform needs multiple data sources,
- Mitigate the risks of bots or malicious actors from taking advantage of compensation for access to data.
- Make it easy to move data across platforms, without expecting the user to be a technology expert.
- Anticipate unintended consequences of changes as fundamental as transferring the control and management of data from Big Tech “professionals” to the “regular” users.
All are important, commenting on a few of these…
#1 and #2, what is personal data, what is the definition of anonymized and 3rd party There is a lot of money resting on this, so this is something the advertising industry is working very hard to get their heads around while the various Privacy Legislation consultations are also picking through this in detail.
#3 creation of a standard valuation for data is going to be difficult to do. The value of the same data is totally different depending on the organization’s revenue model, customers, suppliers, what other data the organization has at hand, the organization’s ability to create new data products and services delivering internal or external benefit. Here’s a worked example of how data can be turned into value: Cooking up Data Products, a 10-step recipe
#4 standards for movement and storage is also a challenge. In fact, storage will also depend on the purpose for storing that data. However the safe, secure and friction-free movement of data is as vital to the data economy as the movement of blood around the body is to life. Iain at Information Answers discusses this in more depth in the post Co-managed data, subject access and data portability
Why It’s So Hard for Users to Control Their Data by Bhaskar Chakravorti on Harvard Business Review