Comments on Richard Thaler "Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All.)" NYT 4/23/11

Professor Richard Thaler, a professor from the University of Chicago wrote a piece in the New York Times this weekend with an idea that is dear to CDP's mission: making data available to the individuals it was collected from.Particularly because the title of the piece suggests that he is saying exactly what we are saying, I wanted to write a few quick comments to clarify how it is different.1. It’s great that he’s saying loudly and clearly that the payback for data collection should be the data itself - that’s definitely a key point we’re trying to make with CDP, and not enough people realize how valuable that data is to individuals, and more generally, to the public.2. However, what Professor Thaler is pushing for is more along the lines of “data portability”, the idea of which we agree with at an ethical and moral level, has some real practical limitations when we start talking about implementation. In my experience, data structures change so rapidly that companies are unable to keep up with how their data is evolving month-to-month. I find it hard to imagine that entire industries could coordinate a standard that could hold together for very long without undermining the very qualities that make data-driven services powerful and innovative.3. I'm also not sure why Professor Thaler says that the Kerry-McCain Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 doesn't cover this issue. My reading of the bill is that it’s covered in the general sense of access to your information – Section 202(4) reads:

to provide any individual to whom the personally identifiable information that is covered information [covered information is essentially anything that is tied to your identity] pertains, and which the covered entity or its service provider stores, appropriate and reasonable-(A) access to such information; and(B) mechanisms to correct such information to improve the accuracy of such information;

Perhaps what he is simply pointing out is the lack of any mention about instituting data standards to enable portability versus simply instituting standards around data transparency.I have a long post about the bill that is not quite ready to put out there, and it does have a lot of issues, but I didn't think that was one of them.