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Category Archives: Privacy
Whose data is it anyway?
Tim Berners-Lee spoke The Guardian this week about the availability, ownership and use/misuse of data. He wants us to be able to more easily own our data - not just the photos and other content we upload to the web in order to share it with others, but all the micro information about who we are, where we live, how we vote/shop/browse, when our dentist appointment is, friends’ birthdays, our shoe size … you get the picture. There has been an explosion in the amount of data collected and stored by companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook, says Berners-Lee, and individuals should be free to make use of it in ways that would be useful to us, not only to the companies that are currently hosting and gathering it.
Whose data is it anyway?
Online data seems to be a hot topic this week in the marketing press…
Next month sees a new amendment to the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive requiring that UK businesses and organisations obtain consent from visitors to collect and use their data. This might put a lid on the heady growth of ad retargeting (the phenomenon of being shown ads based on pages you have browsed, when you then visit other sites). But in reality all online advertising relies on 'passive' data collection, mostly unbeknown to the website visitors, so it will be interesting to see whether the new legislation makes any difference.
