Data Ownership is the Future of Commerce
According to the GDPR, your data is private. It belongs to you and you can choose who you share it with. This revolutionary piece of legislation that came into effect in May 2018 is being mirrored in the state of California by the CCPA which gives individuals ownership of their personal data, control and security. If the rest of the world follows the trend set by Europe, soon each one of us will be the owner of our own data.
But what does this really mean?
Technically, it means that I own my personal data, no matter who I choose to share it with. When I give a website my name, address or credit card details, I am sharing the information, but it still belongs to me. Therefore, no one can use any of that data for any other purpose, without my approval. Data ownership also gives me the right to portability (i.e. I can take my data with me) and most important, the right to be forgotten. I can ask any website to delete all my data.
According to these laws, I should be able to access all the factual data on a website — since it is mine. I can see what personal information I have given, on a retail website, I can view my orders, see what I spent, even what I looked at but decided not to buy.
However, retail websites are also collecting deductive information about me. Deep within their algorithms, they are building a profile based on everything I do when on their site — what do I click on, how often do I visit, am I a person who impulse buys clothing in the middle of the night, do I like browsing video games, do I like leaving five star reviews. I cannot access this information. It is data that is coded somewhere as an Amazon algorithm. So does it belong to Amazon or does it belong to me?
If all the deductive data belongs to me — how can I view it? Can I decide to delete it? Can I choose to share it with a different retailer so that they will know my preferences and can give me better service?
What about social media? Does my Facebook post belong to Facebook or to me? Is my Instagram story my personal property, or does it partly belong to Instagram? When I review a product on a retail website — does that review belong to the website, or to me?
This is a topic that will affect the future of the internet in a massive way. It will affect users — how we shop, how we spend, and how we choose what to share. It will affect retailers — how do we protect privacy, and yet how do we benefit from deductive data. It will affect regulators as more legislation needs to be put into place to define ownership in different situations.
Looking to the future, I believe that retailers need to give this issue serious thought. Regulators continue to be anxious about the size and power of the biggest tech companies; data protection is a convenient path to limit their hold on the market. Yet deductive data is the path to a better user experience and helps retail companies to make their site user friendly, which in turn is better for the users, and therefore lucrative for the retailers.
Looking forward, I believe that the correct path is one where users own their data, can decide who they give it to and for what purposes it will be used. The alternative is dystopia where privacy is a thing of the past and nothing will escape the eyes of “Big Brother” — governments and corporations alike.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) is dealing with this issue in his new initiative called Solid. The idea behind Solid is that private data will be kept independent from the applications that use it, thus empowering both users and businesses. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the World Wide Web as not only a platform for sharing data but as a collaborative space where all mankind could work together to create initiatives. This “read-write web” only works if the developer has a level of control, giving the writers “permission” — what they are allowed to do to the data, and has a way of confirming “identity” — that the writer is who they say they are. In order to write collaboratively, the concepts of permission, identity and managed data accessibility must all be incorporated into the writing program. The concepts that underpin Solid seem to be the concepts that will define data ownership in the future.
The debate over data ownership is raging on and offline. A panel at the MiT Connected Things Conference in 2018 agreed that this subject must be debated so that we can come to a clear conclusion. Not only does a decision need to be made about who owns the data (and all participants leaned towards users owning their own data) but users need to understand how their data can be used by websites. Data is hard to measure and even harder to value. A new facet of the subject was raised at this conference — if a company benefits from a user’s data, should the user be paid?
The struggle between data privacy and greater personalization is felt particularly in the online retail industry. AI and personalization are dependent on the collection of users’ data. Retailers and marketers tell customers that this is for their own good; they can only benefit. Yet in reality, many companies are working to create platforms that centralize and unify data in a way that benefits the company, but may violate user privacy.
I believe that personal data should belong to the user. I stand with industry experts such as Chris Skinner and David Birch who believe that the trend of the next decade will be “customer in control” (and even, taking a wider view — citizen in control). According to Skinner, if a user needs to give permission to a company to use their data — the customer control is just an illusion. Users don’t really know what is being done with that data and how it is being shared. The fact that users cannot share our own data, either because we are too scared about our privacy or because we do not know how, means that we are not really in control of that data. It might technically be ours, but we don’t control it. Birch actually practices what he preaches. The Privacy Policy page of his company website explains in simple English that can be understood by ordinary people with no tech background exactly what data is collected, how it is used and how the user can access and even delete their own data.
As we approach a new decade, I look forward to seeing legislation that will ensure that customers own all their own data. I look forward to awareness campaigns that will explain to the average online shopper where they can access their data, how they can choose to share it with companies, or maintain their own privacy. I believe that this is best for individuals. And if this is best for us, then surely the online retail industry will find a way to implement new and exciting technology without violating individual privacy.
