W.H. Auden on Datamining

The Unknown Citizen
W.H. Auden

 

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

The Value of You: Not Much, Says US Law

Consumer data is big business.  Leading aggregators like Acxiom, Experian and others make hundreds of milions each year, but the individuals about whom this information pertains don’t get a penny.  In legal terms, we have a right of privacy in order to prevent harm but no corresponding right of publicity to ensure benefit from our profiles in the datascape. 

Because business and government make decisions about individuals based on the personal information about them stored in databases, society’s protections have focused on restricting the collection and disclosure of that information and ensuring its truthfulness, largely to prevent institutions from making harmful decisions, e.g., about job offers, insurance rates, bank loans etc. on the basis of incomplete, outdated or erroneous data.  Accordingly, the rights that individuals need—and are increasingly getting–are notice that the institution is collecting information, an explanation of the uses to which the institution will put that information, access to the individual record in the institution’s database, the ability to correct inaccuracies in that record, etc.

Designed to protect the individual from harm, the privacy framework does nothing to ensure the individual can benefit from her personal data.  That’s a matter for tort law, and decisions in that arena have largely denied consumers any interest in the exploitation of the own data for their own benefit.

The tort of appropriation occurs when one “appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another.”  For an appropriate tort to be actionable, the likeness must be complete and generally recognizable.   Consumer profiles in the datascape are never complete—they’re always partial by design—and the courts have upheld the tort of appreciation only for celebrities.  Similarly, the right of publicity—to own, protect and commercially exploit one’s own name and likeness—has been confined to celebrities.

In fact, the courts have ruled that the individual’s personal information has no commercial value.  Specifically, American Express was exonerated for selling its card-members names to merchants because “an individual name has value only when it is associated with the defendant’s lists.”  That is, the aggregator by compiling and categorizing our personal information had created all the value.  

Since aggregators are not alchemists, however, the value of the individual data they aggregate cannot be zero.  Accordingly, some legal scholars have argued that the value of the individual data is determined by how much it takes for a person to relinquish it.  Since millions of us readily give up our information for supermarket discounts, ring tones and other trifles, its value to us must be low, they argue and then conclude that we’re already adequately compensated by the marketplace.

I don’t think it’s adequate and hope some clever entrepreneur figures out a way for me to get a bigger piece of the consumer information business.  After all, I generated that data, it describes me and I’d like to get paid for the use of my likeness.   

Emily Dickinson on Blogging

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson

I‘m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the live long day
To an admiring bog.