The Vision : Personal Information Markets AND Privacy

From the early days of the information economy, personal data has been its most valuable asset. Despite data protection laws, a shadow market is trading personal information without accountability to consumers. As a result, consumers are becoming more and more irritated and lose trust. The lack of transparency, accountability and trust in PI markets fosters market concentration and impedes service innovation. Technologists, economists and regulators are struggling to develop solutions that meet businesses’ demand for more personal information while maintaining privacy. Proposed solutions fail to account for market complexity and provide no pathway to technological implementation. To break this vicious cycle, we propose a four-space vision of personal information markets with privacy. The ‘customer relationship space’ enables consumers and companies to build trusting relationships. The ‘customer relationship holdercontrolled data space’ supports these customer relationships with distributed information processing. The ‘customer-controlled data space’ gives consumers control over the storage and use of personal information. The ‘safe harbor for big data’ provides a free commons in which anonymous people data can be freely exchanged to spur innovative services. We outline how existing privacy-enhancing technologies and legal adjustments can help transition to our model and what market incentives exist to do so.