One of my favorite business books is Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The book serves as the basis for the über-popular freemium model embraced by so many companies today. In my favorite passage, Anderson recounts the tale of an Amazon free-shipping promotion in Europe in the late 1990s. Because of an obscure French law, however, Amazon had to charge a nominal sum in the country (something like a few francs.) In England, there was no such law.
The results of the promotions were drastically different. Despite having to tack on the equivalent of a few pennies, sales in France were roughly 30 percent lower than in England. The lesson: the presence of any non-zero price can have potentially enormous implications.
The flip side of ostensibly paying nothing for a product is that you become the product. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter offer "free" services, but don't think that each company isn't profiting handsomely although, paradoxically, it charges users nothing. Case in point: As I pointed out in Wired recently, Facebook is getting into the data broker business.
Against this backdrop, I found the NPR piece Privacy Or Profit? These Firms Want To Help You Sell Your Data very interesting. From the piece:
"The way we see it, your data belongs to you. So if someone should be making a profit on it, it should be you," says Paul Davis, CEO of U.K.-based service Handshake, which launches at the end of August.
Today, hundreds of millions of us sign onerous terms of service (that few if anyone actually reads) and blithely turning over our data. What if we owned our data and leased it to others? Talk about changing the equation.
Simon Says
No one is implying that John Q. Public will get rich by selling his data—or access to it. (Of course, celebrity data might command a higher price. Who wouldn't pony up for George Clooney's contact list?)
Still, it's hard to forget the lessons that Anderson's Free teach us. If this new breed of data brokers is successful, any price will cause companies to think twice about using data willy nilly.
Pay attention to this trend.
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At a PhUSE 1 day event earlier in the year I suggested the same idea regarding personal health data. If the companies want this information - feel free to buy it off me. This would open up a market - sidestep a lot of privacy rules and regs and free up big healthcare data for use by more people.
The audience (particularly the representative from the EU regulatory organisation) - thought I was insane. Oh well - At least I know I have one suporter in spirit!