The empty promise of self regulation

I am working in the online media industry for the better part of 20 years. I am supposed to say that I am for self-regulation. But as a person observing how we often do business, how we think about data, how we protect it, I have some doubts. Here is why I think self-regulation won’t work (or work as it should).

1. The largest and most profitable businesses in our space are built on sharing and using ever more data, and their record of putting consumer privacy first is spotty at best. Its hard to imagine these companies taking any stance other than searching for the sweet spot of minimum privacy that does not make users leave in droves.

2. In the US, we have the basic assumption that collected data is “ours”, no longer the person’s. Consequently our responsibility is to maximize the usefulness and commercial viability of that data and we spend great deal of resources on doing just that. This is often in direct opposition to honoring the user’s interest.

3. As an industry we have been, so far, unwilling or unable (?) to properly deal with real issues even when they affected our paying customers (e.g. ad fraud, counting, measuring). What makes us think that we will do a better job in dealing with issues when the affected party is not a paying customer who can take revenue somewhere else.

4. We often act like colonists trading glass pearls for gold. We exploit the information gap between the consumer and us as it relates to the value of the information we actually gather, the granularity of the data we have and the consequences of what we do with it, how we trade it, and who we sell it to.

None of this shows that we are going to be good at self-regulation. If we want our ecosystem to remain viable, we need to be open to rules of the road that are not entirely drawn up by us but also by advocates of the persons whose data we collect. Unfortunately I don’t see anyone other than some government agency on the horizon to provide a counterbalance to the pull towards least possible restrictions. I may not like it, but unless we change our approach, it will happen, sooner or later.