Corporate strategies, data, and transparency
My regular Friday column this week in Spain’s leading financial daily, Expansión, is called “Business, data, and transparency” (pdf in Spanish) and is about an aspect of data collection that I often feel is overlooked: it’s not so much a question of how much information is gathered about us, but how it is done, clarity over the reasons, transparency in any analysis then carried out, and the outcome that the user of client sees as a result. In other words, the issue isn’t so much data collection in itself, as going about it properly.
There are some evident paradoxes here: I can think of companies that although they will know a great deal more about me than I do about myself, the fact that the publicity they send me is adapted to my interests is positive, and of secondary interest.
What’s more, they allow me to decide what data I want them to keep, which I want removed, and they offer me tools that allow me to do this. Other companies, which I once gave information, have clearly passed that information on to third parties, as a result of which, I am bombarded with emails and phone calls trying to sell me things I am not interested in. Data management and client privacy are questions that go far beyond the norms established by the data protection agencies of different European Union members, as well as clearly differentiating companies with a 20th century mentality from those of this century.
Below, the full text of the article:
Corporate strategies, data, and transparency
What do businesses know about us? Each day we produce more and more information, and businesses try to capture and analyze it. Tastes, feelings, trends: all garnered from what we say on the social networks. We are signed up to so may services and sites that it is increasingly difficult to get any idea of what big data is dong with our information.
One way to get on top of this is to use a few simple, but highly valuable tools when online. We must demand clarity and transparency at all times. There may be no harm in a company collecting information about us, as long as it’s done properly. And what does “properly” mean in this context? Quite simply the right to know what data a company has about me, what it is doing with that data, and what it hopes to gain from using that data.
Thought about in this way, the results can be surprising: it isn’t necessarily the amount of information a company has about us that is of concern; rather what it is doing with that information. A company can sometimes know more about us than we know about ourselves, but what really matters are the consequences of a company possessing that knowledge. If it is to be used to harass us with sales offers after being sold on to third parties, then we should avoid this happening at all costs. But if the outcome of knowing us better is to be able to offer us products that we might genuinely be interested in, at better prices, or adapted to our tastes, then we might possibly be interested.
It’s not the data in itself that matters; it’s our unequivocal right to know what is being done with that data. The key word here? Transparency.
(En español, aquí)
