Should Customers Have A Right To Knowledge About Themselves?

As product makers and creative leaders, we use data all the time. It informs what we build and how we interact with customers.

Yet, imagine if your doctor acted like Facebook. You visit the doctor where they take your blood sample and run some tests. You’re told your resting blood sugar level is 178. This is data. You don’t know what means. When you ask what it means, the doctor says, “well, many other people have this same level.”

After you leave the doctor’s office, your doctor calls a local donut shop to share that you have a 178 blood sugar level. You immediately start receiving texts and phone calls to sell you donuts, and you never learn you have diabetes. Clearly this holding onto the knowledge of data means creates a power imbalanced that can be abused.

This is the story of Cambridge Analytic. They learned people were predisposed to ideas, then exploited. Check out The Great Hack on Netflix. Were there well-meaning product makers that helped create the Cambridge Analytic tools? The history of research like Milgram’s experiment tells us they’re likely were.

Data is not the same as knowledge. To have data without the knowledge of what it means creates an incomplete picture of the data, and that in itself can be dangerous.

Your Data Is Worth More Than Oil

The Economist ran an article in 2017 discussing how data has surpassed both coffee and oil in its value. On the other hand, a Wired article in 2019 disputed this argument saying oil is fundamentally different than data. The fact remains that data is one of the most valuable resources in the modern era. Why is that? Data enables companies to connect with people to sell and persuade people to believe ideas. Targeting people’s interests and economic status is made possible by the collection of data. But more than that, data has the power to change people’s desires.

Personal data allows us as consumers to be manipulated more effectively. Or hmmm I mean “to be catered to as guests” as people in the tech complex may say. Yet, it’s true that visiting websites which I’m interested in is a better experience then the experience of walking into a mall where 90% of the stores and ads are irrelevant to me. Product makers are always walking the line of treating people guests or pawns.

One of the most valuable things in the world is simply tracking the actions we take, and that information, in turn, being used to guide our actions.

As consumers, we are all stuck in a kind of action-data loop. Being aware that the world around us is personalized not to simply help us but to sculpt our actions is vital to navigating and building in today’s digital world.

Should We Have A Right To Knowledge?

Data privacy is a hot button topic in today’s world. Most schools of thought maintain that people should own the data that exists about themselves. This data privacy debate is exactly the reason that the EU implemented GDPR, which is a set of regulations surrounding personal data and user privacy. Right now you can go to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or other apps and download the data those platforms are storing about you. You can see what keywords advertisers are using to target you and other attributes about your profile. The ability to access this information is progress for consumers, but it doesn’t mean you have complete ownership over that data.

There is also a question for product makers about how much data and knowledge is okay to use to craft, design and create product and service?

I’ve downloaded my data and found that Instagram has me flagged with hundreds of data points including “female-head-of-house.” No joke — that descriptor exists in my Instagram metadata. But what can I gain from this knowledge? What does “female-head-of-house” tell Instagram? How do advertisers target me or my wife with this descriptor?

There is a difference between data and knowledge.

The value in data is that it can be refined into insights.

Questions worth asking:
• Should we, the human data wells, have a right to access the insights about ourselves that companies find?

• Should we the product makers in the age of automation use all the insights we can when we create products?

Photo by Josh Redd and Maria Bobrova