[MyData & Open Data] we have a price: 11KEUR/personal medical data

Sat May 3 15:03:07 UTC 2014

Hi Mark,

We know that there are wholesale markets (and therefore market price) of 
personal
data out there.

Personal data has mostly been used as a commodity so far (and priced as 
such, i.e. low),
e.g. for "basic" targeted advertizing but it is *not* a commodity as 
soon as organizations
are able to extract more value from it.

Suppose that an insurance company gets full access to the personal data
of its clients. This company can update its risk model, terminate the 
contracts
of people with risky profiles (or outrageously increase their price) and 
offer the
best price to the "good clients" (whose probability of having an 
accident or a
disease is low).

Considering this would provide a very strong competitive advantage + 
very high profit,
how much would this company be willing to pay for this dataset? I would 
say more
than $0.26 per client (as suggests FT's calculator).

Regarding the toothpaste metaphor, I would not push it as far as you : 
some personal
data remain "valuable" for a long period of time (i.e. as long as you are
alive and possibly after if the data also concerns your relatives).

For instance, once the insurance company has learned its client has 
diabetes, it can
use this piece of information (and all other data that suggest an 
evolution of his/her health
condition) to discriminate him/her (and relatives of course : if an 
immediate relative -
parent, brother, sister, son or daughter - has type 1 diabetes, one's 
risk of developing
type 1 diabetes is 10 to 20 times the risk of the general population 
<http://www.joslin.org/info/genetics_and_diabetes.html>).

As long as people still believe their personal data has little value and 
that there is no need
to worry about because they have "nothing to hide", data is being 
collected silently,
and irreversibly.

L

Le 03/05/2014 11:33, Mark L a écrit :
> Hi Lancelot.
>
> Thanks for putting forward the misleading nature of this. Personal 
> data is inevitable much more value in the personal sense and in that 
> regard more valuable to some people I know rather than some people who 
> don’t care about me at all.  This is a socio-political issues, in that 
> depending on where you are on the pecking order in your various social 
> strata depends on who your personal data is valuable too and why.
>
> The fact that some corporation will buy this data wholesale for little 
> or great value is a non-sequitor.
>
> As that saying goes :
> After the tooth paste is out of the tube it gets old really quick and 
> very soon gets hard and unusable.  Same thing with personal data. 
>  What is valuable to the corporations is the intention data, the 
> predictive data.  So far we are still in control of our choices.
>
> We also can make our data is always to old or expensive to maintain on 
> purpose, to keep that corporate data value low, with very little 
> effort by altering it just a a little.   So, wether we can pull our 
> data back or not is just the tip of the issue at the moment.
>
> In my opinion, the lower the monitory value the higher the personal 
> value to the individual.
>
> - Mark
>
>
>
> On 2 May 2014, at 21:31, Lancelot PECQUET (Will Strategy) 
> <lpecquet at willstrategy.com <mailto:lpecquet at willstrategy.com>> wrote:
>
>> Well, as Steph said a few weeks ago if I remember correctly: "once 
>> the toothpaste
>> is out, you cannot put it back".
>

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