What information have companies collected about you? Your attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream patterns, etc… and more.
Which companies have personal data about you?
Where is it stored? Who has control of it?
Or rather.. who have they sold it to? And what will they do with it?
MANY companies now maintain a large array of personal info about anyone who uses their website or other services. Most companies use personal data to target products, advertisements and other offers to consumers.
Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank, posted about a future model of user-centric ad-serving where corporations partner with individuals to access their personal information.
Controlling Which Website Access Your Information
First off, I think personalized advertisements benefit consumers more than non-personalized ads. But for a true win-win, consumers must control how their own personal information is accesses by companies. While online, consumers need to be able to control access to selected personal information at a per-website level.
How consumers could control their own personal data:
A user-controlled personal information manager (PIM) would store categories of preferences, opinions, tastes, wish list, demographics, etc. for each individual. Users can choose the level of completeness for which they provide this information. Potentially, this personal information management system could be stored either on a user’s PC or online through a system similar to openIDs. The user controls for the PIM could be implemented as a browser extension for any plugin-enabled web browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.
How Websites Access & Integrate Your Data
Any website could request personal data from a visitor’s personal information manager through a standard API. Through the API, a website could access user-supplied data that would be used to display personalized content, product recommendations, or ad offers .
Website administrators could setup their system to accept visitor data from selected personal data categories from the visitor’s PIM. The API access system would operate on a whitelist system for the visitor like NoScript. Upon visiting a website, a user would see which personal data the website was requesting. The user would select which specific information requests to authorize, if any. Examples of categories requested by a website might be locative data, demographics, interests in product types, or even spending budget. Users could whitelist that website for personal information access on returning visits.
Why Businesses Would Participate
Good old capitalist profit motive! Through the personal information manager API, businesses could access valuable visitor preference data that would not otherwise be available during the consumer’s visitor session.
Take an electronics ecommerce website… Through the personal information API, the website could gain access to visitor information such as: the visitor’s consumer electronics wish list (stereo, TV, etc.), brand preferences, budget, delivery address, etc. If a social networking element were added to the API, a visitor might allow the website to access the upcoming birthday dates of friends’… and the product preferences on their wish lists, etc.
A Collaborative Consumer Relationship Model
How it works:
Businesses give consumers control of their personal information. In exchange, consumers can volunteer to share additional personal information with businesses.
By doing this, each consumer essentially partners with the websites that they frequent. The consumer is now a part of the business’s effort to provide that consumer with the most relevant products, news, recommendations, content, etc.
Consumers become the final element in the supply chain of the products, content, etc. that they consume.
Please leave comments, questions, experiences, or contradictions below! -dan
