We fritter away our privacy, so why not sell it off for money? Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files. Advertisers could be so excited to get their hands on all that information they’d go back to paying for our journalism.
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“Right now,” said Densmore, “There are many people tracking you and tracking me and we don’t know what they’re tracking us for because of the perniciousness of interest-based advertising dropping cookies on our machines. The InfoValet says, ‘Nothing needs to be surreptitious. Let’s be upfront about it. If you want high-value information on the Web, be an open book about your demographics. As a result, you’ll get all kinds of commercial offers.’
“At the other end of the spectrum I may say, ‘I won’t go with the Chicago Tribune because its terms require giving up too much information. I’ll go to a Swiss bank InfoValet—they don’t share anything. But that will mean nobody has the means to monetize me, so I’ll have to pay more for information.”
The elephant has a name if not a body: it’s the Journalism Trust Association, which Densmore told me was being formally established this week in Washington. He hopes to introduce a blue-ribbon panel of advisers on April 27. Densmore’s compared the JTA to the Associated Press, which he used to work for here in Chicago long ago; the AP is a nonprofit alliance of newspapers that serves them all. He’s also compared it to the New York Stock Exchange. A radio interviewer in Saint Louis said it sounded to him like a PPO. Densmore thought that was a pretty good comparison too.
Densmore’s vision involves trading privacy for profit, and that’s one reason the Reynolds Journalism Institute has commissioned a national study on privacy—it’s being conducted by Professor Lee Wilkins, an ethicist on the faculty of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Densmore had a lot of input in framing Wilkins’s questionnaire because he needs to know this: What will consumers trade privacy for, in terms of goods or services? Wilkins is expected to present an answer on April 27.
