The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Privacy, Data Ownership and Sharing

We shall later define the skills and knowledge required of an influence professional and the Chief Influence Officer. Some of those skills will entail developing a command of existing facets of the influence processes, such as search engine marketing or research methodology for example, and some of those skills will be unique to what it means to be an influence professional. I consider a solid grasp of privacy and influence flow sharing to be central to the role definition. (Actually, privacy falls in both camps; there is existing privacy policy and there is the new privacy policy, as we’ll now see.)

Who Owns the Data?

There’s money in them thar flows.

The focus in this brief section is the ownership of that data and information. I say brief because in my mind the situation is clear-cut, at least from my grasp of the expected societal norms of liberal democracies, or, perhaps more accurately, the norms I’d prefer to live with.

That’s not to say, however, that my preference is how things will turn out, far from it; nor is it ignoring the fact that norms can change. But this book isn’t the place for an in-depth social philosophy discourse. It is worth pointing out that I do detect contradictory expectations on this topic however, most strongly in the USA, as I describe below.

This is how I see it.

I consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may ...