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Smile, you're on Google Glass, whether you like it or not

Data collection and user privacy will never be the same

By Caroline Craig, InfoWorld, 03/15/13

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If you are somehow ignorant or skeptical about the scope of that accumulation, it's time to educate yourself, as there are at present few U.S. laws preventing companies from amassing and selling all manner of personal information. The Pro Publica Journalism in the Public Good website lays bare the extent of consumer data collection, which starts with basics like names, addresses, and contact information, then adds demographics like age, race, occupation, and education level.

That's for starters. Did you recently get married, buy a house, have a baby, send a kid to college, and/or get divorced? Data companies know about it and will sell that info, profiting on the details of your personal life. They also collect data about your hobbies, purchases, and charitable donations. A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax collects detailed salary and pay stub information for roughly 38 percent of employed Americans.

The government is also in the information commerce business: Your state's Department of Motor Vehicles may sell information, such as the type of vehicle you own, to data companies. Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be bought and sold for commercial purposes in some states.

The real kicker about this vacuuming up of all your personal data? It's virtually impossible to find out exactly what these data companies know about you. As Pro Publica points out, "You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there's often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name -- or whether it's accurate."

Last week Galen Gruman proposed that maybe, just maybe, users can win the privacy war. Educating consumers on the ways that companies are profiting from their data is a starting point.

I urge lawmakers to require any company that uses your personal data to provide an annual summary of how much money it made from your information. If people knew how much was made off their data, they'd demand change -- or at least a cut of the proceeds (a few startups are trying to create a service around the very concept). These companies track a lot about you, so they can easily track what they sell that value for as well.

Europe has long-standing data protection laws that limit some practices that are standard in the United States. As Reuters reports, "the European Union is now weighing updated rules that would allow any resident to ask companies to delete the information on file about them; the United States only has equivalent rights for those under age 13."

As Gruman notes, the American government is starting to wake up to the issue and take action. But he warns that "Congress is again considering the fatally flawed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill that would allow rampant sharing of personal data across companies in the name of security. Security fears are often used to scare people into giving up rights they shouldn't" -- that and the desire to snatch up the latest gizmo from Google without thought for the consequences for privacy.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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