Personal Information Economics

Full Title or Meme

The idea that our Personal Information is an economic good has gained attention. Is that a good thing?

Context

• From the economic meaning of the term good as something of value comes the question whether all of life's pleasures should be valued in economic terms.

Opposing arguements

PI is an economic good

• A New York Times Economic View is that there is "value as an eonoic resource. It is not clear why data about private people should ever become the economic property of a company, but that appears to be a common phenomonon.

  Data increasingly prowers innovation and it needs to be used for the public good. ... Data provides a record of what has already happened, but its main value come from improving preditions. ... The buzzy refrain of th digital age is that "data is the new oil". ... When Celera mapped a gene first, it protected its(sic) intellectual property by requiring other firms to negotiate licensing agreements or pay high fees before using the dta. Yeras later the genes mapped by Celera led to many fewer innovations and commercial products than those that were immediately put in the public domain.

PI must not be labled as an econmic good

In a Q&A session with Harvards's Elizabeth Renieris the question of

Problems

• Decentralized IDs were created to give user's control of their identifiers, but at the cost of posting those identifiers on a publicly resolvable public ledger. The result is that any usage of the the DID can be correlated with any other use of the same DID. Once sufficient correlations have been accumulated against that DID, the person is uniquely identifiable.
• Most identifier authentication services on the web now offer a Service Endpoint that can provide information about the identifier. If the user is hosting their identifier on there smartphone, no service endpoint on that phone could be always available for query.
• Nearly all of the privacy solution require users to keep separate track of identifiers used in public and private settings. This is not likely to be acceptable to the majority of users if we don't also give them an agent that can track all of their relationships and the identifier that they use for that relationship.