Ray Campbell hits the ball out of the park again with his awesome suggestion in his blog: we need a HIPAA-like regime for the privacy of personal data.  As a mental exercise, Ray has gone through the HIPAA document and substituted “individually identifiable health information” to “individually identifiable personal information“. The red-lined doc can also be found on his site.

The at the heart of his proposal is the notion of shifting the thought paradigm from the person as the absolute owner of his/her personal data to one where the person is seeking the right to know about who has his/her personal data, how they obtained it, what are they doing with it and to whom have they sold the data (the 4 questions).

Following on from Ray’s post and from Professor Sandy Pentland’s view on the New Deal on Data, I believe there should be a new market in the digital economy where individuals can meet directly with buyers of their personal data, and where individuals can opt-in to make more data about themselves available to these buyers.  Cut out the middleman — the big data corporations that are not contributing to the efficiency of free markets.