Privacy on parade, at a price
Lots of people know our personal details electronically...but can't we turn the tables on them?

London Times | July 1 2005

HOW MUCH did you value your privacy? Because there’s not much of it left. Tesco already knows almost as much about me as my mother does. The cookies in my computer record every website I visit. My weakness for questionnaires means that marketers long ago catalogued my income, age, hobbies and frustrating failure to consume their cars/loans/wines.

Maybe I am a whole subcategory, a Cavendish Conundrum discussed in corporate boardrooms. Who knows? All I know is that the ID card debate feels a bit out of date. We will never be anonymous again; we leave too many electronic traces. What we have to do is figure out how to live in this new age: what information we want to keep secret, and what are we prepared to trade.

It’s such a gradual surrender. You tolerate CCTV on the grounds that it might save you from a mugging if anyone has remembered to put the film in. You sign up for reward cards and pride yourself on the £2 voucher for frozen food that expires on Monday. You like Amazon to remember your credit card details: it saves you typing them in every time you buy a book. Even if the data get out, you reckon the card company will pick up the bill.

Then one day you find your phone is haunted by robotic voices extolling holidays in Florida. Your doormat is deep in charity mailings because you once tried to save the whale. You are refused credit because of something you never did, but you can’t seem to correct the mistake. You hear about identity theft, of doppelgängers who take your place on the retail stage and consign you to the bank manager’s waiting room. And you start to wonder why you gave away so much power to a bunch of no-name suits, for a bit of convenience or a free Biro or a lottery draw you never won.

There is nothing wrong with sharing. The problem comes when discrete pieces of information you have given to different people for different purposes are put together. The intelligence services would like to know that you buy subversive books and surf for anti-globalisation websites. Insurers would love to probe your sexual history and drug habit. No joke. My friend Charles found that his company started quarantining all e-mails containing the word “ charlie”, perhaps thinking they had spotted a cocaine addict.

Malign intent is not required for unsettling consequences. There were two examples just this week. On Wednesday, doctors gave a warning that centralising NHS records on to a single database could be a greater infringement of personal freedom than ID cards, because four times more information is involved. And the marketing arm of Barclays Bank analysed its 60,000 top-earning customers and declared that people named David and Susan are richer than those called Algernon. The second is potentially more scary than the first. Why link all that data for a cheap publicity stunt?

It may be tempting to take refuge in the idea that sticking to archaic paper-based systems would protect us. But those days are over. And I can’t stand to watch one more overworked nurse laboriously misspell my details again (“is that Cavendish with a K?”).

This week’s report by the London School of Economics into ID cards was interesting less for its widely quoted figures about cost than for its criticism of the system design. Even the statist French are apparently creating “federated” identity systems with encryption that allows each public service to access only the data relevant to them. The Brits are the only nation on earth blundering into centralised databases, ignoring both the risks of data theft and the gizmos that can create systems proportionate to need. It is perfectly possible to secure electronic data in ways that let individuals take control of it. Ask the guys who founded PayPal, the secure-pay system that dominates credit-card transactions on the net. EBay didn’t pay them $1.5 billion for the name, but for their brilliant security.

Big Brother government was the 20th-century fear, for obvious reasons. But governments may prove relatively easy to tame if we all shout loudly enough and keep a sense of proportion. Networked companies are more tricky. But perhaps we can turn the tables on them if we start thinking like corporations about the value of the information we are giving away. And then find ways to charge them for it.

Most websites will sell your details to other companies unless you tick the “opt out” box which is hidden in the small print. If companies had to ask us to “opt in”, they would soon have to bribe us with more than a smile. Clever companies already know they have to humour us. YouGov, the internet pollster, for instance, pays people for their opinions.

Let’s take this further. One of the most awful aspects of identity theft is the damage it does to your credit rating. You can have a hundred fraudulent transactions taken from your bank account in a day, but you can’t repair your credit rating — or your reputation — for years. This can be devastating if it stops you getting a mortgage or a credit card. So why shouldn’t we start charging credit rating agencies for the information they gather about us? If we all got shares in a credit-rating agency in return for our data, we could vote out directors who refuse to modernise, and get a better service.

During the dot-com boom there was a lot of talk about “infomediaries”: companies that would broker information between big business and individuals, revealing no more than instructed. These may now emerge, if consumers start to realise that the Microsofts and AOLs have more to gain from exploiting the data they harvest from us than protecting it.

The bottom line is that it is time to start actively managing our privacy. It’s no good wishing for the carbon copies of yesteryear. We should give up trying to protect everything and put a price on what really matters.There’s clearly a market in information. Why not exploit it, rather than letting it exploit us?