Rogue Analyst

Going back to the argument that I started in my second post, Monday, February 09, 2004 (I haven't learned the html yet to link within this blog. Help?), concerning the development of a personal information mutual fund type structure, I have some new points to support my position.

Reg Whitaker, in "The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality" makes several good points in his section entitled 'From Surveillance to Dataveilance', pgs 125-128. The current system of data collection, data collation, the sources and availability, and the inaccuracies that occur. He points to the often heard problem of inaccuracies finding their way into an individuals credit report. More importantly, the virtual inability of the individual to get major credit companies to correct the inaccuracies once discovered. These mega data-corps have no real incentive to spend much time in cleaning their files. Worse still, even though there has been legislation to provide the individual the 'force of law' to have their files corrected, it is ineffectual at best, and people may suffer from inaccurate information in their files for decades.

Here is where the individual information account managed by a not-for-profit foundation would be a vast improvement to the individual. The foundation structure would allow the individual to manage his own information, and the individual has every incentive not to allow erroneous negative information in his personal account and to keep the information updated. Conversely, there could be a real an incentive for individuals to inflate the information in their accounts. But, as I previously stated, the foundation would need to establish its own mechanism for verifying the information that individuals enter into their personal accounts, and establishing its own information credibility rating system. And, I do think that current technologies make this easy, and data collection companies already do this to a great extent. The distinction being one that I keep coming back to, the individual should get paid for their information at free market prices.

At some point, when I have the time available I will consolidate the posts on this subject into a single piece, but for now...