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Data industry heading for the rocks?
The fate of the Costa Concordia has been seen by many in Italy as a metaphor for the country itself. A noble ship brought to disaster by a captain allegedly more interested in showing off than in the safety of his passengers. Offsetting this is the everyday heroism of ordinary people going about their jobs and saving lives. Two sides of the tragedy – two dimensions to Italian life.
The world of data has also been turned upside down, albeit in less dramatic style and fortunately with no loss of life. But the reversal is still the consequence of its own actions, many of them just as self-regarding and reckless.
If it had not been for the disastrous decision by BT to allow Phorm to trial behavioural targeting on its network in 2007, the ePrivacy Directive would never have been amended in the way it has. New laws governing cookies – which many organisations are still struggling to work out how to implement – would never have been introduced without this ill-fated exercise.
Few subscribers to BT’s phone lines and Internet services realised that the small print in their contract granted permission for their calls and clicks to be tracked by police and security services. Even fewer could have foreseen that the Interception of Communications laws would be used to justify the use of cookies to track individuals across online advertising networks.
But even without this foolish test, digital marketers were busy intruding into the lives of unsuspecting consumers through the use of cookies (and the integration of search and other clickstream data). If you want to argue that there was nothing wrong with this practice, then consider the parallels with the way Electoral Register data was used for targeting for 17 years without giving the right to the consumer to opt-out.
That practice ended up in court back in 2002. Failure to get genuine consent for the Phorm cookies was dragging the UK government into court. European Commissioners took one look at what was happening and decided to act by introducing the ePrivacy amendments.
The same thing could happen with changes to the Data Protection Directive and for similar reasons – the EC has looked at how companies are using data and does not like what it sees. Requiring an opt-in for every time a piece of data is used is their first response (although it seems highly likely this will get diluted before the law is passed).
So are data users really so bad? For the most part, clearly not. But even those working with the best of intentions and to the highest standards can still cross the line. Using data mining and analysis techniques on big data sets that can follow and profile individuals without holding a piece of what would technically qualify as personally identifiable information is a prime example.
Bad guys in the data industry are much easier to identify – they cold call TPS-registered numbers, spam inboxes and mobiles and misuse the data they hold. Many of those operations are effectively “black hats”. What we need to be wary of in this new era of data regulation are “white hats” who do bad things by mistake.
David Reed is speaking at the IDM Knowledge & Networking event, Whose Data is it Anyway? on 24 January 2012
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