The boss of Telefónica put forward an interesting proposal at a recent breakfast at the Financial Times’ offices in London. Customers, José María Álvarez-Pallete suggested, should have control of their own data. They should be able to see how their data are used, and they should be able to take it with them on leaving the service provider.
Mr Álvarez-Pallete’s suggestion was not casual. Telefónica is working on a platform, called Aura, a personal data space that would hold all the interactions that a customer had with the company. If the customer wanted, for example, to show their telephone payment schedule to a credit scoring company, they would be able to do so.
To the journalists present, the proposal seemed radical. Why would Telefónica want to give our precious data back to us? We have become accustomed to treat as totally normal the idea that data gatherers — whether a telecoms company, a social media platform such as Facebook or a utility like an electricity provider — have first dibs on our information: what we do, how much we spend, where we go, what we watch, the food we eat, what music we like or the state of our health. In the UK, this has been most recently, and glaringly, manifested by news that a National Health Service trust handed over data on 1.6m patients to DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google, a decision that the regulator says “failed to comply with data protection law”.