Introduction

Bruce Kasanoff has predicted that soon we will read books on digital publication readers. Our reading habits will be recorded in companies’ databases and we will have agreed to this, encouraged by some sufficiently appealing offer.

But whether or not digital readers take off, much of our own lives already are an open book. Authors in this volume have described how our lives are constantly recorded and scrutinised – how we have become ‘glass consumers’.

The personal information economy does represent a new world in formation. It forces a fresh exploration of what our rights and responsibilities are. And yet the full contours of change remain far from clear. The economy is an elusive being, its existence marked often by absence rather than presence – the lack of supermarkets in deprived areas, the withdrawal of businesses. Its shape is further obscured by the opacity of organisational practice.

This book therefore set out to illuminate some of the darker corners of this economy. We have traced its most recent history and explored its operation in both public and private sectors. This chapter now moves on to discuss the National Consumer Council's (NCC) own agenda for change, to promote positive ways in which responsible information use can advance consumer interests.

Moving to a risk-based framework

The NCC's recommendations are shaped for the world into which we are moving. They focus on the importance of how information is used – it is not argued that information should rarely be collected, although much will always depend on the circumstances. Instead, we argue that personal information issues should be conceived and managed with much greater sophistication. We are living in a world in which, more than ever before, our personal information defines our opportunities. It is now time to reappraise our assumptions, adjust our expectations and challenge the old rules.

We need to appreciate but move beyond the traditional demarcation lines of privacy debates to recognise the broader benefits and risks of using personal information. In the future, policy will be formed less exclusively on the battlegrounds of privacy but on those of risk and of accountability.