Privacy in the Autonomous Age

We want more control over our lives: some of us are digital-social-butterflies, and some are digital-hermits, with myriad subtleties in between.

Laws are too blunt an instrument, slow-to-change and slow-to-enforce, for something as fast-changing, subtle, and individual as privacy.

The mantra “information should be free” has us thinking about the information we want to access: entertainment, news, and our social networks. 

Postage fees keep junk mail somewhat in check, but essentially-free email makes spam proliferate almost without bounds as online sources of information have scooped physical media, and the proliferation of resources has led to a plethora of choices tailored to meet specific interests and needs. The newspaper industry is still struggling unsuccessfully with this dichotomy of pricing for physical vs. electronic delivery.

But we don’t think about the other side of that digital-coin: who has access to our personal information, and more importantly what they do with our personal information.

Organizations have gotten quite innovative in prying our identity from us: frequent-flyer programs, supermarket cards, … they give us discounts, special sales, and even free merchandise – I especially like the free pastries from Panera. For a while I used different middle initials to track who sold my email address to whom – it was quite enlightening.

Revenue from using our personal information has fueled a gaggle of Silicon Valley firms, so we wind up both annoyed by ads/spam and then we have the costs of using our personal information added to the price when we buy something – a double whammy!

For example, most of the revenue from ads based on matching our personal information goes to Google ($50 billion in 2012), Facebook, Twitter, and many other companies, but not to us.

If we monetized our personal information, we could get some of the money back in our monthly check from Google for allowed uses of our personal data, and at the prices we set!

Unfortunately, this use of our “free” personal information has also spread to abusers: unauthorized purchases, identity theft, and spying.

If our personal information were monetized, these abuses would become commercial theft and our capitalist system is accustomed to dealing with exactly those kinds of issues.

Monetizing our personal information isn’t some theoretical idea, it’s already done for our health information with HIPAA, Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act. There is an extremely high price for misuse of Personal Health Information (PHI): $50,000 per instance, plus criminal penalties. But if it were valuable enough I believe someone would make that tradeoff. Unfortunately, my experience shows an appalling variability in understanding of HIPAA in the health industry, from both private and public officials.

Today if my doctor or my hospital is violating my HIPAA privacy my only options are to report a HIPAA violation, not likely to accomplish anything and certainly not in a useful timeframe, or to take my health issues elsewhere. I would prefer to choose my health providers based on their medical competence; fortunately at least one of my doctors excels at both medical knowledge and data smarts.

If we monetized my personal information, I could just collect my fee from the doctor a bill for the way they used my personal information because they signed on to my price list before I started working with them J.

The organizations that are already using our personal information cry foul when we talk about changing the rules – remember the flap I mentioned in the last post about the right to know bill, and that didn’t even include charging for using your information, it was just tracking who had it, a prerequisite for monetization. Tracking information is just a subset of what is already required for HIPAA, including: anyone with your Personal Health Information has to track who accessed what information, when and why (that occupied about 1/3 of the database in my former company).

But what about all the new businesses that will emerge in this exciting new information marketplace – we can’t hear their side of the story because they don’t exist yet. We don’t know what services they would offer us and thus we don’t know how much we would benefit from them.

Remember that just 15 years ago Google, Facebook, Twitter, LOLCats J and other huge companies that thrive on, and profit from, our personal information didn’t even exist.

So let’s have some fun and speculate about what kinds of new services and products might emerge in this new environment, where we charge for uses of our personal information.

The obvious new growth industry is Personal Information Market Places: potential users of personal information come shopping to see what we are selling for what prices. Google and others do this now in the online advertising market, but you don’t play a role (except potentially through privacy settings), so even today this is a huge industry segment.

Another growth industry will be Personal Information Pricing Apps to help you set prices for your personal information. These prices can be quite intricate because you want to charge different amounts even for the same personal information depending on the use. For example, your car dealer would pay one price to send you a notice that your car is due for it’s next service, but a higher amount to send you an ad to buy a new car (unless you are in the market for a new car, …).

Another growth industry will be Personal Information Agents to help market your personal information to potential users. One type of user will be a Profit Maximizer, who wants to get as much money as possible from use of his personal information. This in turn will spawn another growth industry for use by purchasers of personal information to help determine that someone is a likely customer for their products, and not just scamming them – perhaps we can retaliate for all the spam we have received over the past decade J.

Then there will be Personal Information Data Use and Payment Trackers or “Personal Information Ambulance Chasers” J – apps that assure you are being paid for use of your personal information, and checking for improper uses of your personal information. Your price list will include prices for uses of your personal information beyond what was paid for, and for any unauthorized uses of your personal information. The Enforcers will by paid by the abusers as a percentage of the funds paid to you – so you still get your full price for the abuse of your personal information. For example, you would allow your doctor to use lab results for your diagnosis, but not for release to a pharmaceutical company for marketing drugs to you – you would have a different price for that, perhaps very high, and an even higher price to both the doctor and the pharmaceutical company if they abuse your personal information by not paying ahead of time for sending that drug ad. J.

And I’m sure there will be a host of other innovative ideas.

For example, suppose I suffer from a rare condition, Heinleinitis (an overpowering urge to read Robert Heinlein’s work). I may choose to donate information about my condition to a research effort to cure it: I specify exactly what information I disclose (e.g., I maintain my anonymity), and how it may be used (e.g., only for research, not marketing). Now suppose this research results in a cure for my condition. Because I donated my personal information to the original research, in effect contributing capital to the startup company, I get discounted, or even free, access to the treatment; I might even get an ownership share in the company for my contribution – sort of like Kickstarter (I contributed to a Kickstarter project to publish Adirondack folk music and because the project was successful, I received tickets to a concert and a copy of the resulting book).

But suppose this cure for Heinleinitis is only shown to work for left-handed people between the ages of 35-40, and the company wants to show that it works for left-handed people between 40-45. The company might offer free treatment to the first 100 people 40-45 who will test the cure and agree to provide specific information, which is sufficiently limited to maintain anonymity. Once the tests show that it worked, the company can target advertising to sufferers of this dread condition who are willing to be contacted for $2 – the advertising goes through a Personal Information Market Place and possibly a Personal Information Agent.

Thus monetizing our personal information will allow each of us to express our digital-personality: Digital-Age Social Butterflies; Digital Hermits, Digital Opportunists, Digital Philanthropists, …

We live in a capitalist society, so let’s use the tools of capitalism to help solve this conundrum of our age. In the future, the costs of acquiring personal information will be included in business plans, financial reports, and audits to assure compliance. Imagine spammers being sent to prison for non-payment, and being charged damages to compensate you for abusing your personal information.

You might ask what all this has to do with Autonomous Vehicles, that’s the topic for more posts.