The FTC released a report on customer privacy this week, setting forth best practices for businesses and recommending to Congress legislative actions on privacy. In testimony this week, the FTC’s chairman noted that it is a “decisive moment” for customer privacy.
This is a good time to re-read my post from a month ago about the trade-offs in thinking through privacy. While I don’t think it’s enough to say that customer privacy is no longer relevant, as some say, it’s also important to remember that where the privacy dial is set seriously affects the viability of internet business models. We’ll have more posts on this topic.
For now, I wanted to mention a concept in the coming privacy regime that will be a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs: portability. This is not an emphasis in the FTC report, but it is in the EU’s draft regulation on privacy. Article 18 of the draft EU General Data Protection Regulation says:
Where the data subject has provided the personal data and the processing is based on consent or on a contract, the data subject shall have the right to transmit those personal data and any other information provided by the data subject and retained by an automated processing system, into another one, in an electronic format which is commonly used, without hindrance from the controller from whom the personal data are withdrawn.
It’ll be interesting to see what this ultimately means, but imagine that it means that individuals have the right to access their own information on their searches, check-ins, likes, clicks, etc, and do with it whatever the individual wants. Assuming that we will have access to that data to keep in our own data briefcases, there will be enormous opportunities for startups to help us do something with it — whether it is to integrate data from various sites together into new useful applications, to monetize it so we personally share in the marketing opportunities, etc.
We should keep an eye on how portability becomes real in the EU and how it spreads to other jurisdictions, but with data being at the heart of the internet economy, this is a coming inflection point for a whole host of new opportunities.
takingpitches 