This is the fifth installment of a series in collaboration with the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Japan, which will explore how the coronavirus pandemic has revealed the need for a reset of the world’s economic and social systems.
As you read this, it’s likely that information about you is being bought and sold by a technology company. Maybe it’s data on your movements, collected by that jogging app you signed up for. Or it could be information about your finances or your health. The information might identify you — your name, your address — or maybe it has been “anonymized” and mashed together with data on thousands or millions of other people. Either way, your personal information is a commodity, and a potentially valuable one at that.
The idea that the private details of our lives can be bought and sold like oil or cattle futures is unsettling. We’d rather not think about it, even if every precisely targeted advertisement in our social network feeds reminds us that it’s happening.