Personal Data Is The Leaded Gasoline Of Our Generation

Personally Identifiable Information is the leaded gasoline of our generation. Since leaded gasoline was introduced in the 1920's, and for the 50 years that followed until it was banned - it had catastrophic impact on public health.

Similarly the proliferation of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - especially when shared across apps without full user consent - pollutes the social space and needs to be removed from the environment. I'm not a fan of regulation but good thing the European regulator stepped in with GDPR compliance.

GDPR - The General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. Many recognize it from the barrage of emails sent during May 2018 as the regulations went into effect. Mostly reminding us to unsubscribe for forgotten services.

As the CEO of Superfly Insights, a data company, I've experienced this problem first hand. For the last 6 months I've been working with our partners on a consensus-driven protocol for refining data - removing all PII while maintaining the data's commercial value. An open garden with anonymized and compliant data is a dream for developers. From business intelligence applications to investment insights developers can profit from building apps and services on standardized sets of data.

I'll elaborate more on this topic in upcoming post but if you believe in the data revolution and that data is the new oil (yes yes, overused but still relevant), having the EU step in to remove PII makes a lot of sense. I can only hope that it will serve as a beacon for other countries who will shorty adopt similar sets of regulation and encourage companies to clean up their act.