Monetize Me? Privacy & the Quantified Self in the Digital Economy

Abstract

Lifelogging and self-quantifying used to be niche areas for athletes, people with certain medical conditions, and those with the time, money, and motivation to use expensive specialist equipment to monitor themselves. Now the technology for ordinary people to track and analyze many aspects of their lives is becoming both affordable and invisible, requiring little effort or expense to collect. There are many business models based on mining the so-called 'digital exhaust' of people's online activity to provide apparently free services. The fact that so many more people are now able to automatically log so many aspects of their lives (beyond which web pages they visited) is creating opportunities for new business models to provide services for the people generating the data. For example, some people may wish to sell their data for cash rather than give it away, some may wish to donate it to worthy scientific causes, such as health research, while others may wish to share data only in a non-identifying aggregated form or perhaps not at all.

This seminar will describe how the ‘Monetize Me?’ project has sought to understand the privacy and sharing requirements of Quantified Self (QS) users, how those requirements vary across groups of users, and how new business models may help to build a sharing and privacy infrastructure for lifelogging data.

Biography:

Maureen Meadows is Professor of Strategic Management at the Centre for Business in Society (CBiS) at Coventry University. Maureen spent ten years at the Open University Business School, including five years as Head of Department for Strategy and Marketing, OUBS, and leader of the MBA module in strategic management. She was previously at Warwick Business School for thirteen years, where she directed the MSc in Management Science and Operational Research for five years.

Formerly Chair of the Special Interest Group in Strategy at the British Academy of Management (BAM), Maureen is now a member of BAM Council. With a background in mathematics, statistics and operational research, Maureen has over 20 years’ experience of working with customer data and analytics, both as a practitioner in the financial services sector and an academic. She has published on the progress and problems experienced by organisations working on strategic projects such as market segmentation, relationship marketing and customer relationship management.

She was a co-investigator on the Leverhulme-funded Project 'Taking Liberties?' concerning public/private blurring in the surveillance society, and she is currently a co-investigator on an EPSRC-funded project ‘Monetize Me? Privacy and the Quantified Self in the Digital Economy’.