“Platforms recognize they have to deal with privacy. They're looking at how they can be competitive.”
Privacy is an essential part of an organization's distinctiveness. Privacy is increasingly being used by organizations as a weapon in the battle to gain a larger market share. Everyone benefits, you would think, but what data is collected by digital tracking systems and what happens to it? Do we still have insight into and control over it? The ignorant consumer and citizen often experiences it as one big trick. He feels that his privacy is being violated and is actually being violated.
Technology becomes intimate
On the other hand, it is also the consumer who leaves more and more data about themselves on the list to data web. Via sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but also via all kinds of devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs. With the emerging Wearable Computing trend, this problem is only getting bigger. Technology is becoming more intimate and is literally getting under your skin. How much extra data will people soon leave behind when they put on Google Glass or wear an Apple iWatch on their wrist?
No one has ever said it more powerfully than Meglena Kuneva:
“Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”
Ms Kuneva, as European Commissioner for Consumer Protection, said it in her keynote speech at a roundtable on online data collection, targeting and profiling in Brussels at the end of March 2009. Kuneva's remark immediately raises a question: if personal data is the new currency of the digital world, where are the banks?