This article written Diarmaid Byrne, Editor, STQ, was published in issue 08 of the Social Technology Quarterly. Summary: In the face of rising demand for data, privacy and ownership become a critical concern as vast amounts of data are accessed and bartered without the knowledge of people. In such scenarios, it is crucial to determine practices towards maintaining privacy.

1. 6
Campaigns
CarpeDatum!
WhoKNowsWho
Youare?Inthe face of rising demand for
data, privacyand ownership
becomeacritical concernasvast
amounts of dataareaccessedand
bartered withoutthe knowledge
of people. In such scenarios, it
is crucialto determine practices
towards maintaining privacy.
byDiarmaid Byrne

2. Kuliza Social Technology Quarterly Issue 08 7

3. IBM estimates that every day the world produces 2.5 quintillion
bytes of new data. That is a billion, billion. While it is incredibly
frustrating for businesses to wade through, manage and make
sense of this ocean of ever-expanding data, there is also a
tremendous opportunity for individuals and companies. A 2011
report by the McKinsey Global Institute projected that the United
States requires 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with deep
analytical expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers to
work in fields such as politics, sports, advertising, healthcare and
science as businesses move towards data-driven discovery and
decision making.
There are several examples of companies making decisions
based on sophisticated data analyses. A retailer such as Wal-Mart
analyzes sales, pricing, economic, demographic and weather data
to determine the range of products that should be availalbe at a
particular store and when to offer discounts. In the case of public
safety, police departments use various data points on weather,
payday, sporting events and arrest patterns to predict crime hot
spots and deploy police in advance. In healthcare, increases in
Google search requests for ‘flu symptoms’ and ‘flu treatments’
indicate an increase in flu patients that will visit hospitals. In
economics, house-related searches on Google are a more
accurate predictor of house sales for the upcoming quarter than
forecasts of real estate economists.
There is, however, a troubling aspect to all this: who owns
my data? What rights do I have over it? Can I determine how it
is used? Do I have a right to earn money from my data if other
companies can earn money from it?
People have very little information on how their information is
shared. Of course there are user agreements, but how opaque
or transparent are these? Also, how many people read each
line and understand the consequences of what they agree to?
Privacy policies and fairer information practices are inadequate
because these assume that users understand all the details and
implications. Public reactions to changes in Facebook’s privacy
policies are a realization of what we as users have signed away.
But how many other social networks and websites receive full
rights and access to use their users’ data? Facebook is merely the
most common one that gets the most coverage.
The biggest concern, from my perspective, is the lack of
contextual integrity, an argument postulated by Helen Nissenbaum.
She argues that online services share information in ways that
violate social norms. In the case of Facebook, I cannot control
where the information I share with a friend or a specific group
ends up. In the case of Google searches, I do not know whom
that information is sold to or how they choose to utilize it, except
when I have furniture advertisements following me for weeks after

4. Kuliza Social Technology Quarterly Issue 08
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One area recently where this has been a cause of concern is
the discussions within the US Democrat party about whether to
sell voters’ political opinions. Obama’s two presidential election
victories have partly been due to a deep understanding of voter
information and the utilization of various media. His election team
relied not just on publicly available voter data – name, address,
party affiliation – but party volunteers also collected information on
their views and preferences. This enabled the Democrat party to
estimate how likely a voter is to vote Democrat, support Obama, or
what opinions they have on gun control or tax rates.
It is possible for the Democrat party to contemplate this because
individual states have different laws about how voter data is used;
some mandate that it can only be used for political purposes and
others ban using it for commercial purposes. However, information
that is freely provided by the voter is not subject to any mandate,

5. of data flows and bartering practices by companies they share
their information with, opt-ins as part of privacy agreements, or the
ability for users to sell their data to advertisers. There are a number
of companies offering this service already, such as Eliken, BlueKai
and eXelate. The evolution of such services may be the most likely
method of solving privacy concerns while maintaining contextual
integrity of a user’s data.
References
Beckett,Lois.“Will Democrats SellYour Political Opinions to Credit Card
Companies?” Salon,06 Feb 2013.
“Big data:The Next Frontier for Competition.” McKinsey & Company.
Bruder,Jessica.“What ifWeb Users Could Sell Their Own Data?”The New
York Times,02 Oct 2012.
Lohr,Steve.“The Age of Big Data.”The NewYork Times Sunday Review.The
NewYork Times,11 Feb 2012.
Milian,Mark.“Data Bartering Is Everywhere.” Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg,15 Nov 2012.
McKee,Steve.“Big Data Can Make a Big Difference in Marketing.”
Bloomberg Businessweek.Bloomberg,14 Sep 2012.
Nissenbaum,Helen.“A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online.” Dædalus,
the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.(2011): 32-48.
suggesting that the Democrat party can sell it to retailers, marketing
agencies and credit card companies.
This shows how little information people have about how their
data is used. It is an issue of contextual integrity. I share my
political opinions as a means of supporting a political party. I do
not expect that six months later I will receive marketing material
and offers for a specific retailer based on the type of political views
I hold. Irrespective of legal impediments, there is a breach of trust
that has deeper implications for collecting such politically crucial
information in the future.
The flow of data from one organization to another makes it
incredibly difficult to determine, restrict or limit where it will end
up. A new trend called data bartering will make this even more
troublesome. Companies exchange their databases, often at no
cost. Businessweek discussed the case of Waze, a community-
based traffic and navigation app in which drivers share real-
time traffic and road information. In order to break quickly into
the Brazilian market, they traded traffic, roadwork and collision
data they would collect via their app for geographical mapping
information from Multispectral.
A similar case is that of Factual, a company that maintains a
database of restaurants and retailers in the US. Businessweek
notes that Facebook, Groupon and Yelp provide user-contributed
information on retailers to Factual’s database. Any company that
wants to access this information typically has to pay, but they can
receive discounts by trading relevant information with Factual. For
larger companies access to the database can even be free.
Another major trend emerging is wearable technology that
measures different aspects of a user’s health and fitness. The
Basis watch measures sleep patterns, heart rate, distance
walked and calories burned, amongst other things. For exercise
enthusiasts these figures are very informative, but once the watch
or wristband, in the case of Amiigo, is connected to a computer
and the data is transferred to your account for you to view a record
of your exercise, health and sleep, who owns that data? Who else
would be interested in that data? What can a company similar to
Basis do with the information? With whom can it be bartered? As
someone who is very physically active, were they to trade or sell
my data there would be many interested sports manufacturers
and insurance companies to buy it. While this may benefit me,
it breaches my trust with the provider as there is no contextual
integrity about where my data flows.
If data bartering is restricted to location data, there may be little
harm. However, if it includes bartering thousands of users’ personal
data, opinions and medical information it becomes problematic.
There is no way of ensuring the contextual integrity of a person’s
data. One’s perspective may change if users have control over
how their data is used. This could be partly through greater clarity