On the data economy’s bingo card, the word personalization is the center square. It’s a must-have for corporate-speak, used to explain how a company justifies collecting a vague amount of your data. If you’ve ever felt confused about what you’re signing up for when you click “accept” or what happens to your information, you are not alone. Ask ten companies about what personalization means and you’ll get ten different answers. No one really knows because it’s a marketing term that means everything and nothing. Let’s unpack some examples of personalization to show how it can be used, understand what companies are doing with your data, and what you can do to make sure your data works for you.
Your data is your valuable property, and you have the right to decide how it should be used. To understand what ownership looks like, and how you’re being treated in the data economy, an analogy about property we fully understand can help. For example, Marco owns a truck and occasionally lends it to his friend, Pauline, for her errands. In return for his generosity, Pauline brings the truck back with a full tank of gas and picks up a candy bar for him as tokens of her appreciation. It’s a consensual trade and Marco and Pauline come out ahead.
Months go by and the relationship changes. Without Marco’s explicit consent, Pauline monetizes his property by renting the truck to her neighbors and keeps the cash for herself. The neighbors also leave trash in the truck and return it with new dents in the door and no gas in the tank. Pauline took advantage of their relationship, privately profited, and passed the costs to Marco.
Both versions of this trade happen every day in the data economy. The first is a consensual, mutually beneficial arrangement, whereas the second exploits Marco to Pauline’s and her neighbors’ benefit.
Now let’s explore more literal examples of personalization in action. Dolph lives in the suburbs, works in a city, and is a creature of habit. His alarm goes off at 6:45am every morning and he starts his day by listening to music. The morning playlist is automatically queued and includes a couple of new songs the app picked based on what he listened to last week and a few old favorites. Dolph opens his maps app and his commute is already plotted, with a warning about highway traffic and a suggested alternative route. Dolph stops at his regular coffee shop before leaving town and his usual order is pinned to the top of the loyalty app.
That was three instances of personalization before 9 am. Dolph received convenience and knowledge, helping him navigate the day. The music app makes a customer happy to keep him subscribing, the map app learns valuable information about commuting patterns, and the coffee shop serves its regular customer faster. For one morning, the data economy and Dolph are on the same team.
Then Dolph’s phone rings and he learns that his grandmother passed away. The morning’s small conveniences suddenly feel beside the point. Dolph needs to be several hundred miles away by tomorrow.
First, Dolph pulls up an airline website to find plane tickets: $340. Next, Dolph checks social media and messaging apps he and his family use to share information to figure out logistics. Finally, he calls his brother to find a rental car, hotel, and decide who’s picking up whom. Dolph opens the airline website later and learns the same flight is $570. The information collected about Dolph while he coordinated with his family increased the price he was offered by $230.
This type of pricing is not theoretical, it is here. According to a recently filed class-action lawsuit, this type of personalization was allegedly used by JetBlue to surge ticket prices using customer data.
What companies do with your data
Personalization isn’t a legal term. Even personally identifiable information is not much better. Compare that to a term that carries legal weight, such as protected health information. Those words require companies to do specific things, not do others, and provide you with rights. Personalization has no heft. It’s marketing language used to describe whatever a company happens to be doing with your property. When a company says “we use your data to personalize your experience,” they’re saying, “we use your data for stuff and things.” It’s a squishy word that means whatever it needs to mean.
Privacy policies are supposed to define what they can do with your data. Most people’s eyes glaze over and never bother to read them. Rightfully so. People are not expected to read and interpret legal papers they didn’t write at a moment’s notice for every company they deal with. Here are my notes about the airline’s privacy policy and what they say they collect and what they do with it.
| Section | What the policy says | What that actually means |
| Notice to customers | States that “This Privacy Notice is not a contract and does not create any contractual rights or obligations.” | The policy doesn’t bind the company to anything in it. |
| Information collected automatically | Uses tracking technologies including cookies, web beacons, embedded scripts, location-identifying technologies, voice-processing technologies, device fingerprinting, in-app tracking methods, and “other tracking technologies now and hereafter developed.” | The company may use many different identification tools and reserves the right to use ones that have not been invented yet. |
| Artificial intelligence | AI technology may be used to personalize a user’s experiences by analyzing a user’s browsing behavior “to train our AI algorithms.” | Your data can be used to train their AI for free. |
| Information on behalf of our partners | Collects and processes information about users on behalf of partners such as other airlines and partners. States that the company is not responsible for how its partners use the “Partner Data.” | There are more rulebooks you’ve never seen and the burden of knowing all the rules is shifted to you. |
| Information from other sources | Collects additional information from “data brokers or resellers from which we receive data to supplement the data we collect,” along with social networks, partners, and publicly-available sources. | What you gave them is only part of their profile about you. They can shop the open market for the rest. |
| Sharing of information | Shares information with service providers, vendors, corporate affiliates, partners, sweepstakes sponsors, law enforcement, and counterparties in a merger or acquisition. | The company says they can share your data with most entities it interacts with on a regular basis. |
| Policy changes | Reserves the right to rewrite the policy in whole or in part, at any time, in its sole discretion. | The terms can change at a moment’s notice. |
Solutions
When it comes to collecting and exchanging your data, companies should be using your contract and not the other way around. You have the right to decide how your property is used. To exercise that right, you need to know what fair terms look like and be given the chance to negotiate. You cannot do that alone, but you can with collective representation that acts on their behalf. This is the longer-term solution and what My Data Union is building. It is a collective that negotiates terms on your behalf, so the next personalization is one you want. Collective representation is the only way to make sure your property gets used on your terms. Sign-up for My Data Union’s waitlist below to join the collective and learn more about the data economy from the newsletter.
To make a meaningful impact now, here are a few tips that take less than five minutes to do. Doing each one makes it harder for companies, like the one above, to use your property against you.
