mCordis Blog Global Regulatory Discord and The Dawn of The Personal Information Economy

While the U.S. administration is dialing-back on regulations that protect personal information, European regulators are ratcheting them up." Michael Becker"We've lost control of our personal data." Tim Berners-Lee.Remember Orwell's book "1984"? It turns out that George Orwell might have been an optimist. Since the dawn of the Internet, we've looked at the web as a boundless resource of easily accessible information. However, the internet might be taking more information from us, its users, than we are from it. While we unconsciously use the web and all the devices and services that hang from it, our daily routines and data are monitored, captured, mined, refined, used, and sold. Whether it be social media, checking the latest news, or looking up the score of last night's ball game, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been steadily archiving our personal information including our browser behaviour, search activity, purchases, and increasingly, our physical location, to just name a few of thousands of data bits, labels, and scores being associated with every one of us. It is clear that this data has value. In fact, the access and control of our digital identity may be worth as much as $1.1 Trillion USD in Europe alone by 2020.