Blog Post 12/30/2008

Companies and organizations are building huge dossiers on each and every person that interact with them. These digital dossiers are used to make decisions about how we are treated by those organizations in the future and, when shared, provide information to other organizations about how they might treat us. Under current legal enforcement of intellectual property (IP) individuals have little or no chance of understanding how these decisions are actually made. Individuals are not considered the owner of the data being collected about them, even though they have in fact created that data simply by living their lives. The obvious question is: what constitutes intellectual property? A model that at one point in history could’ve been followed was that of patents. Patent law forbade the patenting of organic life. In our more recent history though we have seen companies manipulate the system so much so that this standard for patents no longer holds. Companies such as Monsanto hold patents for all sorts of plants which have been genetically modified and are thus considered available for patent. Applied to the observance and recording of individuals lives in the digital world companies are essentially collecting a sort of DNA and calling it IP, thus setting up ownership over digital life.

In The Numerati, author Stephen Baker discusses the importance of mathematical modeling in our modern world; specifically the mathematical modeling done to insure that individuals fit profiles most profitable to the organization seeking their patronage. The current paradigm is that individuals make an agreement that they will provide this constant data stream to organizations in return for some sort of beneficial trade off. An example of this is that when I go to my local grocery store they scan my shopper card, collecting vast data about me and in return I receive coupons on products they believe I might be inclined to like and discounts on regular items. Realistically I am not getting anything for this trade. The grocer has re-baselined the products at a higher price to allow for the discounted price to be more or less a normalized price. The coupons I get are mostly an attempt to get me to purchase products that are at a higher price than what I most often purchase. This is exactly what the mathematical modeling is meant to do. Since I am not really getting anything of value in return and I am providing this business the opportunity to market even more precisely, shouldn’t I at least have the benefit of owning my data? Sadly the ownership of the data is only a small part of it; the data is your digital DNA and giving someone control over your DNA is an awfully big leap of faith – particularly when you don’t have any expectations of being told what they are doing with it.

We must start questioning how the systems are designed to deal with making those decisions about individuals. I’m not only talking about the basic code behind the software technology but also the business rules and processes that are related to the decisions. As individuals’ digital lives become more and more transparent to those with the financial where-with-all to track and decipher them (and thus correlate the data to the individuals’ analog life) we must realize that it is important for the individuals to also have that level of transparency of the organizations.

Using very similar data, applied to local population bases, we can see how this information is being used to further differentiate individuals and segment people. The most recent Presidential election revealed the level of data collection being done by the Obama campaign. Using MyBO, local voter records, and other available databases the campaign was able to pinpoint voters in categories such as: “definite supporter” “leaning towards supporting” “leaning away from support” “definite opponent”. In a much more negative example the mathematicians used digital datasets to find increasingly larger and larger groups of people to target with subprime loans – an industry that lead us to the fall of banking giants such as Lehman Brothers. Ever increasing use of the core life data of individuals gives powerful organizations; those who make decisions about laws, healthcare, social service, financial service and etc. the ability to deny rights and opportunities to individuals and groups as they so choose.

In democratic nations the development and application of laws by the government are carried out in a very transparent format so as to attempt to maintain a level of fairness across the population. Obviously this system has not performed successfully in all cases; notably civil rights law. Now however the digital world has expanded our daily interaction and existence beyond the reach of many legal statutes with our digital person at risk of being co-opted and manipulated by organizations with no social contract towards openness and transparency. Only through this transparency of process and system can the populace at large protect the rights and equality of the individual; minimizing the chance of minority group marginalization.

So if we are to create transparency across all organizations won’t we essentially remove the security that protects both an organizations competitive advantage as well as individuals’ privacy? I believe that in the current climate the individuals’ privacy is already lost from the vantage point of organizations. An organization’s competitive advantage is not secured by privacy but through innovation, agility or share. The larger question then is how transparency may provide greater security than privacy has, both for the individual and the organization.