Big data and the changing economics of privacy

There was a time when only people with money to hire a detective could dig into someone’s life. Now, dozens of companies have sprung up that will prowl into a person’s past for as little as $2.

This shift illustrates a fundamental change in the economics of privacy: it has become cheap and easy to pry into the lives of others at the same time that protecting our own lives has become time-consuming and expensive. A look at two companies — one that sells your data and another that protects it — shows the business and policy lessons of this new reality. It’s important to remember that there’s nothing illegal about compiling information. Just as a busybody can visit libraries, courts and public offices to collect information about a neighbor, companies like Intelius can use computers to do the same thing. There is a problem, however, with asking citizens to rely on solutions like DeleteMe or TrueRep to guard their privacy. Namely, this ‘pay for privacy’ approach doesn’t acknowledge the new economic imbalance in which personal data is cheap and anonymity is expensive. Can every individual afford to pay off companies that can harvest and sell their data for next to nothing? Intelius suggests paying data brokers for privacy is like paying the phone company to keep your name out of the white pages. But this analogy doesn’t take account of the fact that the ‘people search’ companies disclose much more information than the phone book.