I have heard from people in the industry that trading of customer data is the norm in various sectors of marketing, retail and mobile networks. It is still shocking to see this in the news:

Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers.

It seems that the company itself alerted the Information Commissioner once they discovered this. Christopher Graham, who has been recently appointed as the IC, has called for prison sentences for those trading such data.

I am keen to go much further and close down the entire unlawful industry in personal data.

Sounds good, provided the definition of unlawful is customer friendly.

This is the other side of the bad coin of personal data – which is itself imprisoned in various silos and platforms. There are quite a few online that have more than ‘custodial’ overtones – Models of Data Imprisonment.

It was great to see Data Liberation Front announcing their goal to liberate data from the mighty Google silo about two weeks ago. They have been around in a more geeky form for some time as an open-source Blog Converters project for federating the exchange of data between blogging platforms… and one of the reasons I went for MINT rather than a name with data liberation in it.

I particularly liked this bit:

We believe that users – not products – own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We’d rather have loyal users who use Google products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.

This is unreservedly good news. Exporting your data ought to be part of basic functionality of any web app, web service or web platform. The fact it isn’t means it needs to be fought on many fronts. People’s Font for Data Liberation, anyone?

Instead of painting the palace walls, how about helping with finding:

* executives in a position to tweak their organisations database to provide downloadable transaction/purchase history to their customers or users OR anyone who think they might know someone.
* data-geeks with understanding of open formats and/or database data exports.
* developers interested in providing users with analytical functionality and ability to mine their own data

Bonus link (thanks Johnnie!): Let My Data Go! by Brian Fitzpatrick

Cross-posted from the VRM Hub

Last night’s VRM Hub was full house, with two visitors from out of town – the VRM Godfather Doc Searls and Mathias Baert from Belgium – half a dozen new people and great conversations in a pub afterwards. At the main session we talked about a new project called MINT:

MINT initiative was set up to ‘liberate customer data’* from company systems and organisational silos. We assist organisations that directly interact with customers or users, and retain data about transactions, to make purchase history data available to download at no charge, in open formats and fit for further use. The targeted organisations include, but are not limited to, retailers, utililties, telecommunications, public sector etc.

MINT recommends the following formats for customer’s purchase history data export: CSV, XML or JSON, Atom. We advise and provide technical implementation to those organisations that require it. Where there is human readable data, it ought to be machine readable for futher analysis and added value. Where there is machine readable data, it ought to be human readable for comprehension and accessibility.

MINT stands for ‘My Information, Not Theirs’ and is a market RIOT initiative, a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users. MINT is based in the UK but will work with organisations located anywhere, whenever practically possible.

The MINT initiative is open to anyone wishing to have their data liberated from closed platforms and silos and falls into one of the following categories:

• somebody in a position to tweak their organisations database to provide downloadable transaction/purchase history to their customers or users OR anyone who think they might know someone.
• a data-geek with understanding of open formats and/or database data exports.
• a developer interested in providing users with analytical functionality and ability to mine their own data

The next VRM Hub will be on Thursday October 29, speaker to be announced and sign-up page published shortly.

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*Note: Alas, the Data Liberation Front had already been taken at the time of the MINT idea but not until very recently it has also sprung to action. Excellent news and hope this will be a decent snowball. I suppose we could always be the People’s Front for Data Liberation…

One of the examples of web apps that handle user data right is Wesabe. Their attitude to data is spelled out in their Data Bill of Rights:

and practically in ability to export data in CSV or XML formats.

Their ‘competitor’ is mint.com (far more popular in the US and not in any way related to this MINT), which provides similar functionality to wesabe. At a glance the main difference is in their focus – wesabe is more community oriented money management tool, mint.com is more about how many ways you can benefit from money management. That said, I use wesabe without the community dimension, I am interested in understanding and managing my spending better. (Also, I believe mint.com doesn’t handle UK bank statements, only US ones.)

Investigating Mint.com’s approach to user data, I came across this thread in their support forum. It’s from 2007, so not a news flash, what caugh my eye was the user reaction:

It took a couple of weeks for mint.com to sort that out and all is well.

Why use Mint section has a use case spend less eating out and a testimonial:

Trying to rein in his spending, Sean Hsieh began using Mint.com to track his expenses this summer. [He] was shocked to learn he was spending $800 to $1,000 a month dining out.
—Orange County Register

The obvious point about this is that user autonomy increases with understanding own behaviour, which happens with observation and analysis of own data.

Knowing how much you’re spending is the first step to managing your money. Knowing any other things about your behaviour is the first step to pursuing what you want. This is why this MINT is pushing for liberation of customer data, focusing on purchase history as that is fairly consistent (relative to other customer data companies might collect) and straightforward to do.

This quote by Mark Andreesen, from October 2004 no less(!) sums up what MINT inititive wants to address:

You can’t get your reputation out of eBay, you can’t get your purchase history out of eBay, you can’t get your stores out of eBay. It’s a plantation owner/sharecropper kind of relationship

Getting hold of my purchase history in both human and machine format should be a big deal. After all, an informed customer is a better customer, or so many a marketing tagline would have us believe. Purchase history is not only about the money I spend, which is informative, scary and boring all at once. It is my buying behaviour, patterns and preferences that I would certainly find interesting. Ultimately, it’s the kind of data that only I can process meaningfully, add value to it and potentially share it with those who care about me as a customer.