At present this data is smeared across thousands of different locations in hundreds of formats ranging from paper forms at your chiropractor's office to digital records captured by the supermarkets you frequent to the often erroneous credit profiles kept about you in the vast data warehouses of companies such as Experian and Equifax. It is stored by the IRS, lost by TJX and analyzed by anyone who can get their hands on it.
This data might be high grade (for example, your tax returns and medical records are in-depth, detailed and specific), or low grade (such as your searches and your click stream as you navigate Amazon). But whatever the source or the quality, that data has value and it is guaranteed that someone, somewhere, considers even the smallest part of it valuable and worth exploiting.
Just consider the various customer loyalty programs that supermarkets run. You enter your ID and the detailed knowledge about what and when you buy gives them an in-depth, detailed and very personal profile of you. They know what kind of plonk you drink and even your favorite brand of hemorrhoid cream. It doesn't get much more personal than that.
Now, if you truly owned any of your data then you'd be able to control who gets access to it, what parts and how much of it they could see, how long they could retain it and what exactly they could do with it. That is, of course, exactly what the commercial world doesn't want and, for a number of profound reasons, not what I suspect the majority of people want either.
Let's first consider what it would mean to own your own data. Owning anything is a responsibility and in the case of any data, this is a task that requires a lot of sophistication and knowledge if you're going to do it effectively and reliably.
In the case of your personal data it means verifying, organizing, categorizing, storing, updating, archiving and securing it, along with negotiating its release, its deployment and its use with and by interested parties. That looks a lot like work. In fact, it looks like heavy lifting and no fun at all.
Well, people are working on technologies and services that aim to make personal data management easy and effective. At Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, for example, there is . The goal is to develop a set of tools for Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), which has been described as the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as practiced by businesses.
I recently talked to Joe Andrieu, CEO of start-up SwitchBook, which plans to help you manage your Internet searching such that your activities are organized and what you're looking for is kept private -- what the company calls . Andrieu is passionate about the need for VRM and says SwitchBook will implement the policies and methodologies for VRM, all of which is great.
But the problem I foresee is that without real privacy laws, with user interest in managing one's own data currently almost non-existent, and with nothing even remotely approaching a public dialog on how our data is routinely used and abused, how can VRM work? The fact is our society needs VRM and needs it now. So, how can we, the IT industry, the only people who "get it", help the rest of the world to get it?