Who Said Privacy Was Dead…..?

BT decides against deploying Phorm behavioural tracking.

The mobile phone directory Connectivity/ 118800 shut down by pressure from individuals who did not want their details scraped and published.

Facebook found to be in breach of Canadian Privacy law.

So, what have Phorm, Connectivity and Facebook got in common? Referring back to the Personal Data Eco-system framework – you’ll see that all three have reached out and surreptitiously tried to grab data from one of the other categories and move it into ‘Your Data’ (that owned by the organisation in question) in order to make money from it:

– Phorm tries to grab the web site use data from where it currently resides (un-structured, difficult to access ‘My Data’) and move it into their own domain (Your Data – both Phorm and BT variants in this case)

– Connectivity scrapes data from a range of ‘Their Data’ direct marketing files and turns that into another ‘Their Data’ data-set/ domain

– Facebook fails to put adequate processes around ‘Our Data’ (keeps it for an unlimited period) and thus attracts the attention of a regulator.

Exposing these various data grabs is now much more common – because there are now enough people watching and willing to act on it.

Privacy is on the way back…..albeit almost from the grave….