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March 28, 2002 on 9:00 pm | In Main |Many people have been discussing privacy on the internet of late. A flavor of the discussions can be found on Politech. I’m beginning to wonder if the issue is really privacy. I think the issue is of ownership of transaction data. My proposal is that both parties of a transaction should “own” that transaction, and have a say in what is done with the data. Before the age of computers, each individual transaction had no value. Today, aggragated transaction data has quite a bit of value. The interesting thing about my proposal is that it would essentially make the credit reporting firms illegal, in that they profit from data ownded by individuals (and the second parties in the transactions — credit card firms, mortgage companies, bill agencies). If we owned our own data, some people may choose to allow their data to be sold, some would want to share in the profits, and some would not want their data shared at all. This illustrates my point that the issue isn’t privacy, but ownership.
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