Free Hacking Happiness by John Havens

interview for Hacking H(app)iness . Fertik is CEO of Reputation.com, a leading provider of online reputation products and services. In reference to data brokers or other sites not wanting to make it easy for consumers to understand byzantine terms of service agreements, Fertik says, “As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you or your data are the product.” While Fertik doesn’t feel companies selling data are necessarily mendacious in nature, he points out, “They simply don’t care about your privacy. Between the right thing and mammon, mammon will win." 10
    Fertik sees a future of protected consumer privacy via data vaults or similar services as being inevitable. Besides being ethically sound, there are powerful economic motivators for companies as well as individuals to innovate and evolve a personal data economy. A primary aspect of this motivation will come in flexibility of how companies will obtain consumer data in the future. Fertik outlines four primary types of exchange he envisions, where companies will provide the following to consumers in exchange for the right to access their data:
1) Coupons or discounts
2) Special privileges based on status (While this could come in the form of airline points, an evolution of this idea would be for influence or reputation points to be portable between airlines.)
3) Cash, virtual or real (“virtual” meaning virtual currency)
4) Privacy (People can make their purchases without revealing any data for a fee.)
    These four examples provide a pragmatic approach to monetization in the personal identity management economy. While themodel may cause anxiety for some brands reliant on purchasing customer information, the real people set to suffer in this system will be data brokers disintermediated in the process. For brands, this will provide more direct access to their customers and more opportunity to establish value-added relationships.
    If consumers begin trading or selling their data in this type of model, brands also won’t have to work as hard to advertise. Consumers will become masters of their own data and be able to meaningfully engage with brands that they want to interact with to create opportunities for mutual value creation.
    John Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, a nonprofit headquartered in Boston whose mission (according to their site) is to “develop a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions,” has created the Open Mustard Seed (OMS) Framework as an open-data platform that helps users take and keep control over their personal information. Along with ensuring trust between users and anyone trying to access their data, Clippinger feels having user data in this form of “pool economy” means you can create new markets. As he explains in “ Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy ,” 11 reverse auctions (where users provide their data for sale instead of others using it without their knowledge or consent) could create “enormous efficiencies” in the future. Think about a model like Craigslist, where people list items they want to sell, specifying their own prices and specifics around the interactions. These data pools could provide that protected infrastructure.
    The Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, where Kaliya (aka Identity Woman) is executive director, is also creating an infrastructure that is helping to change the data market and make it real. Almost one hundred companies around the world are working on tools to help people collect, manage, and get value from their own data and build new ethical data markets. By joining theconsortium, companies have to make a commitment to give people the rights to their own data and work toward interoperability so people will not be trapped by a particular provider.
    If the personal data economy becomes widespread, consumers will also manage access rights to their data directly