Let's get personal
To the thud of junk mail on the doormat, we can all now add the intermittent ping of spam arriving in the inbox, the beep of fraudulent text messages and, increasingly, the evening inquiries from polite Indian telesales staff who must wonder why the English are so short-tempered. Eternal vigilance is required to keep one's address, e-mail details and telephone number out of the databases of the spammers. But that might not be the right approach - perhaps we should give out more information rather than less.
Recently, for example, my wife and I bought a Wendy house for our daughter to play in. If the spammers found out they would bombard us with offers for toys, potties and parenting magazine subscriptions. That's useless - we already have a couple of potties, after all - but it's useless only because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It would have been good to receive offers from rival Wendy house manufacturers before we made our choice. Junk mail is only junk mail when it offers us nothing that we want.
We would like to receive information about products we're thinking of buying. That would require us to tell other people what we want to buy - although not how badly we want to buy it. Sadly, we can't trust the spammers not to abuse that information with a series of half-educated guesses about what they think we might like. So we leave them completely in the dark, to their loss and to our own.
A better system would be for us to compile a dossier about ourselves and our families, including birthdays and anniversaries, favourite authors and music, need for loans or mortgages, and what big purchases are under consideration. We would own that information and could give it or even sell it to companies who wanted our business. If the information was good enough, and used intelligently and sparingly, it could save a lot of time, effort and money.
That is the fantasy that companies hint at when they ask us to provide information, but we aren't providing enough detail for them to send us much that we would really want to receive. Nor do we trust them enough to tell them more.
All that might be changed by agents who would manage our personal information on our behalf. This information agent would pay us for the privilege, and forward us offers in which we might genuinely be interested. The companies making those offers wouldn't see our details - they would simply know that they were reaching 20 or 200, or 200,000 people with the characteristics they desire. We could be much more detailed in our dealings with the agent, specifying a desire for more offers, fewer offers, levels of confidentiality and an expiry date on the information.
Presumably people who are more generous with their own information are likely to be paid more for it. The whole concept is based around the insight that individuals could and should have clear property rights to their own personal data. It was explored by Kenneth Laudon, an information technology professor, in an article 10 years ago, and brought to the attention of economists by the economist and technology pundit Hal Varian.
Some companies are already starting to offer this kind of service, although the most popular application appears to be that of purging information from databases that might be used by fraudsters. It seems that our personal information is still largely governed by the law of the jungle. When that changes, we might find ourselves more eager to share our desires with the world.
垃圾邮件变废为宝？
除
了被邮递员重重扔在门口鞋垫上的垃圾邮件，现在我们更可以加上电子邮件收件箱中接踵而至的垃圾电邮，嘟嘟作响的欺诈短信，以及日益增加的晚间电话调查――彬彬有礼的印度电话销售员一定会揣测，英国人的脾气为何如此暴躁？人们需要永远保持警戒，以免自己的住址、电邮资料和电话号码被收入垃圾邮件发送者的数据库。但这可能并非解决问题的正确途径――也许我们应该提供更多信息，而非更少。
例如，最近我和妻子为女儿购买了一幢温迪屋(Wendy house)供她玩耍。如果垃圾邮件发送者知道此事，它们会对我们进行狂轰滥炸，发来各种玩具、幼儿便盆和育儿杂志订阅的促销信息。这样做是没用的，毕竟我们已经有了好几个幼儿便盆，但它之所以没用，只是因为它们对我们只有一知半解。如果我们在决定购买之前，能够收到来自其它温迪屋制造商的报价，那将是一件美事。垃圾邮件之所以是垃圾，正是因为它们无法提供我们想要的信息。
我们愿意收到关于我们正考虑购买的产品的信息。这需要我们告诉别人我们想买什么――但不透露我们的购买欲望有多强烈。可悲的是，我们无法相信垃圾邮件发送者不会根据它们的一知半解，猜测我们可能喜欢的产品，并据此滥用我们提供的信息。因此，我们拒绝向它们提供任何个人信息――这是它们的损失，也是我们自己的损失。
对我们而言，一个更好的办法，就是汇编一份关于我们自己和家人的档案，包括生日和周年纪念日，最喜欢的作家和音乐，是否需要贷款或按揭，以及正在考虑哪项大宗采购。我们应该拥有上述信息，并可以将其给予甚至售予那些想要和我们做生意的公司。如果这些信息足够全面，而且这些公司对其加以聪明而谨慎的利用的话，那将非常省时、省力又省钱。
这就是各家公司让我们提供个人信息时所暗示的美好景象，但我们并没有向它们提供足够的详细信息，使它们能够提供我们真正想要的信息。我们也不是十分相信它们，去告诉它们更多的信息。
如果能有一些代理机构替我们管理个人信息的话，那么，所有这些都将发生改变。这种信息代理将购买我们的信息，并将我们可能真正感兴趣的产品和报价信息转发给我们。那些提供产品的公司看不到我们的详细资料――它们只知道自己接触到了20个、200个或者20万个合乎它们要求的潜在客户。在与信息代理商的交易中，我们可以提出更详细的要求，详细说明我们是需要更多信息还是更少信息，我们个人信息的机密等级，以及信息使用授权的有效期等。
想必，透露更多个人信息的人，会为此获得更多的钱。而整个理念基于这样一种认知：个人可以且应该对其个人资料拥有明确的所有权。这个理念是由信息科技教授肯尼思?劳东(Kenneth Laudon)在10年前的一篇文章中提出来的，经过经济学家兼科技大师哈尔?瓦里安(Hal Varian)的推介，已经得到了经济学家们的关注。
一些公司已开始提供此类服务，不过，目前最为普遍的做法，似乎是从可能被骗子们利用的数据库中清除信息。看来，我们的个人信息仍在很大程度上受控于丛林法则。当这种情况改变时，我们或许会发现，自己更渴望将自己的愿望与世界分享。
