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Nothing Personal: Personal Content
Vendors Confront New Rules for Success |
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21 March 2005 |
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Congressional hearings, major retoolings of vendor policies
and concerns over long-avoided regulations hang heavy in
the air for personal content vendors these days. Was a
crisis of this kind avoidable? Probably so, given the lack
of focus that many personal content vendors had on how
their content was being used and the assumption that
possession was nine tenths of the law when it came to
relations with people profiled in their databases.
Successful personal content companies today win when they
treat their products first and foremost as a personal
service that has both the opt-in and the control of the
people profiled. Technology helps to drive the scale, but a
people-first approach to personal content is the key. |
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Vendors
responsible for managing electronic databases of personal
content such as credit histories and criminal records have been
a quiet, self-policing bunch for the most part in the past
decades. The likes of ChoicePoint, Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax,
Experian, LexisNexis Thomson and TransUnion along with other
institutions entrusted with personal data try to keep the
government out of their hair by working proactively to protect
the integrity of their databases. Individuals are encouraged by
these services to update their profiles for accuracy and
completeness and have a strong commitment to customer service
for both individuals checking up on their own information and
clients wishing to purchase it. At a glance you'd have to say
that these were companies that were good stewards of personal
content.
Unfortunately for these companies the personal content
industry has had this image of good stewardship blown away in
recent days, with back-to-back exposures at ChoicePoint,
LexisNexis and Bank of America that have been heavily
documented in the mainstream press (recent BusinessWeek
coverage). Recent Congressional hearings in the wake of
these problems have noted other exposures, such as the ease
with which Thomson's WestLaw unit makes Social Security numbers
available to its subscribers (New
York Times - subscription may be required). Clearly the
market's glance of earlier days was an insufficient scrutiny
for a broad problem with global impact.
The real roots of this problem would seem to center on the
assumptions built around many database services serving
marketing needs. The database services managing sensitive
personal content grew up in the era of "big iron" mainframe
databases, when data collection and distribution was a fairly
rarified art practiced mostly on private computer networks for
a relatively small number of users. With criminals and the
corrupt around the globe quick to milk these sources, the
assumption of good people being on the other end of a
transaction for personal content is about as valid as the
thousands of huckster emails arriving in the typical email
inbox these days. The power of individuals equipped with
powerful and affordable technology is something that content
services born on the Web have understood all along, but it's a
lesson that's just starting to catch up with many database
providers.
Further governmental intervention is likely but not assured
in the short run as the spotlight on issues that drive
electability moves quickly from one point to another. At this
point, though, regulations are not so much the issue as the
core premises that have driven database vendors into this
predicament in the first place. Here are a few items for all
database vendors to consider in the wake of the difficulties
that personal content vendors face:
- Refocus on the stewardship of facts. The rights of
a publisher to databased facts are fairly slippery at best,
so providers of databased personal content have only one real
service that they can sell: trust. The increased competition
in the personal content industry parallels the intense
pressures on all database publishers to find profits at a
time when ubiquitous technology has reduced rather than
increased their potential for profitability. The lines for
use of licensed content and copyrights are very clear for
most database distributors, but the lack of those lines for
personal content and other harvested sources of content
aren't going to protect you from scrutiny by both governments
and the marketplace. Careful proactive audits of content
sourcing and usage policies for all unlicensed content
sources are likely in order these days for any database
publisher in the wake of the recent public incidents
surrounding personal content vendors.
- Learn from the Web. Where today's social
networking and directory services build relationships and
marketing opportunities one person at a time with the
explicit opt-in permission of their participants, most
personal content companies have not placed relationships with
individuals as their highest priority. Yes, there's a strong
effort to try to get individuals to subscribe to these
services in some instances, but the consent of individuals to
use facts about their personal lives is never a hard barrier
to the commercialization of those facts. In an era in which
the content industry is moving rapidly towards the
facilitation of one-to-one communications on many different
levels, database publishers need to come out from behind
their protective veil of technology and secrecy and recognize
that the eBays of the world that can play fair broker to both
sides of a content-enabled transaction at a very personal
level via technology are going to be the winners in database
publishing.
- Empower people to care about quality and security.
The I.T.-intensive culture of many personal content providers
keeps them focused on building powerful barriers to keep
intruders out - thankfully so, on many levels. Yet this very
focus tends to keep people thinking more about machines and
markets than the individuals who make up those markets. For
all of the focus on workflow integration and personalization
that many database providers are building into their products
most are not very effective or efficient collectors of
feedback from creators and users of their content. Companies
such as Eliyon who make it a point to build open
relationships with individual users online to support their
data quality efforts for personal content give users control
over their own personal content online, making it easier for
them to establish trust with those users.
Thinking about the personal aspects of database management
may take time and culture changes, but the companies that
collect and manage personal content with more explicit opt-ins
from record "owners" and allow those users a strong degree of
control over their profiles and awareness of their use are the
ones that will thrive in today's content marketplace. Big
databases are great for many purposes, but content quality and
product integrity built one profile at a time very personally
stands a far greater chance of succeeding in an era of
user-centric content. Nothing personal, mind you, but it's time
for personal content companies to embrace practices of respect
and ownership of personal content that have been evolving
online for more than a decade.
-
John Blossom
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