Informed Consent (Editorial)

Acxiom Corp. is a valued member of the Arkansas business community and just the kind of business we need more of: clean, well-paying and home-grown. So we take no joy in the news that a sudden decision by Facebook to stop buying some of its data will hurt the company’s profitability. Our friends and neighbors work there and are investors, and we know of nothing that Acxiom has done that is illegal or even unethical.

But — and you knew there was a but coming — the business of buying and selling personal data, always a little creepy, is overdue for a good, hard look.

It’s one thing for a company to pay attention to what its customers are buying and use that relationship for mutual benefit. Netflix knows which of its programs you have chosen to watch and has developed algorithms to predict other shows you are likely to enjoy. Amazon knows what you are ordering and never fails to suggest things that are “frequently bought together.” (Arkansas Business knows that if your company has appeared on one of our weekly lists, you might be interested in subscribing.)

It’s another thing entirely to learn someone you may not even know IRL (“in real life”) has, by taking one of those goofy personality quizzes on Facebook, given the unknown quiz developer permission to mine data about all his network of “friends” and sell it to who-knows-who. For that matter, it was shocking to learn that a company like Equifax could be so cavalier with the most private financial data of millions of consumers who never expressly chose for Equifax to have it in the first place.

Anyone who posts anything on Facebook should have understood that it was giving that information to Facebook. But it’s unreasonable to argue that users of Facebook’s Android app truly understood that they gave Facebook permission to capture metadata on their phone calls. It’s time for consent to share data to be informed.