English | EN The Personal Information Economy
Apr 8, 2013
Be sure not to miss the international launch on this website of our 3rd Big Data research report on Tuesday, the 9th of April 2013! Title: Privacy, Technology and the Law. Big Data for everyone through good design. [DOWNLOAD]
The so-called “personal information ecosystem” is described in the Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change report by the American Federal Trade Commission of March 2012. This document contains extensive recommendations to organizations and policy makers along the lines, successively, of Privacy by Design, simple choices for consumers and transparency. In the economic system, the individual is central and a wide variety of data is being collected about all of us.
This is being done by media, government institutions, energy suppliers, airline companies, credit organizations, the retail sector, telecom companies, cable companies, insurers, banks, hospitals, doctors, drugstores, browsers, commercial websites and social networks.
Information brokers, including credit companies and the advertising industry, use and combine these data and in this way they end up in banks, for example, or with marketers, media, authorities, legal organizations, individuals, upholders of justice and employers. It concerns online and offline data, originating from individuals, their computers or other devices.
The only situation where the recommendations of the FTC report are not applicable is where an organization only collects privacy-neutral information of under 5,000 individuals a year, and does not share it with third parties in any way whatsoever.
It may remain a mathematical limit, but with the increasing demand for Privacy by Design, transparency, openness, notice, consent and more particularly the individual control of the information collected with regard to storage, processing, combining and dissemination will increasingly assume concrete shape. Organizations need to be aware of this and be ready. This means: gathering fundamental knowledge and organizing your operation accordingly.
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