Distributed models to give data control back to consumers?

Equifax’s data leak was truly monumental; it involved compromised information of 145 million people. An interesting part of the story was the hearing with former and current executives of Equifax, Yahoo, and Verizon at the US Senate Commerce Committee. In this hearing the interim CEO of Equifax Paulino do Rego Barros indicated that it is Equifax and other companies that own this consumer data, not consumers, and consumers have no control over it. This even when it emerged that several customers have had their data collected without their directly knowledge. How long can it continue like this?

Finance services and health care are two areas where companies have a lot of data from people. It is often also very sensitive information in nature. There are many companies in those industries, and people often use services from several companies. It is often valuable too for the consumer that companies can share information between them. For example, when you go to a doctor or hospital, it can help in your treatment that they know your medical history, and when you apply for a loan or use wealth management services, your finance history helps to find the right products and make decisions. But it must be consumer’s decision to share this data.

We have had two parallel, but slightly opposite, developments with the internet. While each individual can generate more activity - for example publish his or her photos, articles and have their own e-commerce site - the data is concentrating more to some central places, such as to big companies, data aggregators, and data processors (for example Equifax or online marketing platforms). Now we can see developments that we could move to more distributed models with data too and individuals could get better control over their data.

This technically is also linked to blockchain development that particularly has an impact on the finance industry. Blockchain basically distributes finance data, transactions and authority around the Internet, to individuals and their nodes. A person can have her or his own bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet, which is not the account of a bank or finance institution. Now we will see solutions where people can have their own safebox for their finance, health care, and other data.

Lawmakers will probably try to give further rights to consumers to control their own data; in some countries sooner, some later. But new distributed ledger and data models can empower consumers sooner to take control and impact the balance. In finance and data services we can see development that the control and databases will be distributed. It is not anymore a hierarchical centralized model to manage data, but it will be a distributed model with the consumers in control.

Read the whole article at Prifina Blog.