Feel like you’ve lost control of your identity and personal information? The “Reclaim Your Name” initiative aims to win control back for you.
Reclaim Your Name is the brainchild of FTC Commissioner Julie Brill, who ventured into the belly of the Beast on Monday — AdAge.com — to make a case for more consumer control over Big Data.
“Data brokers, marketers and other companies that join the big-data stampede while ignoring basic privacy principles do so at their own peril,” she wrote. “Brushing … principles aside has led some companies to adopt a ‘collect first, ask questions later’ approach to personal data.”
Brill announced Reclaim Your Name earlier this year, during the height of the NSA eavesdropping scandal. Her point: Government monitoring might sound alarming, but for most Americans, corporate monitoring is a much more real possibility.
Reclaim Your Name calls on the data collection industry to make it easy for consumers to find out what information data hoarding firms have, and to fix any errors. Brill envisions a web portal, one-stop-shop for finding data and correcting mistakes. Already, we’ve seen some steps on this direction: earlier this year, data broker Acxiom unveiled AboutTheData.com, which lets consumers get a sense of the billions of pieces of data Acxiom houses on its servers.
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