My Data is Your Data

Photo courtesy of Frederico Cintra via Flickr

Even though my job title contains the word "analyst" (Senior Prospect Research Analyst, if you want the long version), I haven't really thought of myself as a Business Intelligence or "data" professional until this week.

Usually, I think of my job as something like "helping to bring donors together with causes they're passionate about" or "helping to support the University's hundreds of educational and social and cultural and scientific programs." But this week was my first week in the MIS 587 online class at the University of Arizona, and after hearing the lectures and reading the recommended articles, I realized that even though the ends of my professional work are donors and programs, the means of getting them together are, quite often, data.

In the first lecture of our course this week, we learned that Business Intelligence covers all parts of data and its uses: collecting data, cleaning it, reporting on it, storing and analyzing it. 

And also this week, at work, I spent much of an entire day cleaning an incoming data set consisting of thousands of records which will soon be imported into our University's donor database. I spent another morning listening to a product vendor preach the benefits of receiving up-to-the-minute notifications of our donors' social media clicks. And I spent several more hours combing through online data sources (property assessor databases, state corporation commission databases, old newspaper records, archived internet pages) to compile individual profiles of potential donors so that our gift officers will be able talk with them in a more meaningful and directed way. Was this Business Intelligence? I think so. I hope at least that it's intelligent business - helping the University to connect with passionate donors. At our organization, as with just about any nonprofit of any size throughout the world, data is helping to drive these connections.

However.

Even though the nonprofit and for-profit worlds are both subject to scrutiny, nonprofits must often live up to a higher standard, especially when it comes to the use of personal data. In the UK, nonprofits have recently come under heavy criticism and even fines for using their donors' data in ways not specifically approved by the donors. The UK's Data Protection Act (DPA) covers which uses of personal information are and are not allowable. The DPA applies to all uses of personal data, not only to uses by nonprofits, and the list of violations is a lengthy one, affecting both commercial and non-commercial enterprises.

So far, in the United States, personal data isn't protected under a sweeping federal law such as the United Kingdom's DPA, but is instead protected sector-by-sector, with specific laws such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) for banking and credit data, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for personal health and hospital data, and (the one I'm most familiar with) the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which restricts how and when and by whom the personal data of students and alumni of educational institutions may be accessed and used. Interestingly, the U.S. is one of the few industrialized countries (obligatory PDF warning) not to have a comprehensive Federal privacy protection law. 

It's no secret that we freely hand over our data each day to nameless strangers, through Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media. Or when we sign up for an online video or shopping service. Or pay a bill online. Or sign up for an online newsletter. We've come to expect that our name and phone number and addresses (both email and home) will be sold and re-sold, traded and grouped and packaged and parsed. We'll be put into voting blocs, and buying blocs. Every click on a link is a wave of the hand, signaling our unique, personal interests. (I once made the mistake of going to the MeUndies site because I'd heard their ads on a certain podcast for months and finally wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and then for weeks afterwards I was followed everywhere I went online by MeUndies ads. I couldn't even browse the web if people I knew was standing nearby since I was too embarrassed to have them see images of the soft, comfortable, extremely affordable underwear on my screen.)

Anyway. 

As technology's impact on our lives grows, I think we're becoming more aware that our personal data is doing untold, unknown things in the background of our lives. Some of those unknown things are useful (such as, I hope, connecting donors with their passions), and some are just annoying (robocalls), and some are downright dangerous. Personally, I suspect we're getting more and more comfortable with handing this information over to the world, knowing, or at least hoping, that the information will ultimately benefit us. Just today alone, for instance, I've shared my data with Firefox and Chrome and Google and Youtube and a couple of different ISPs, and Amazon, and Amazon's Alexa (seriously, the Echo is a pretty great little machine if you can get past the fact that it's constantly listening to everything going on in your home), and with the Wink smart home hub and its motion detectors, and various home appliances, and with Sprint and its GPS and data usage tracking, and with an unnamed fast food restaurant and my unnamed bank which helped to pay for the sausage biscuit and iced mocha, and with probably at least a dozen other companies and data aggregators I didn't even think about, since I'm fairly confident that the bits of information those companies know about me today will help to make my life tomorrow a little better.

But still. Knowing what I know, doing what I do for a living, researching people and their passions, and now learning even more through the MIS class about how our personal data is being used, I'm starting to think twice before giving a "like" to my Aunt Mabel's latest status update. I know just how quickly a simple "like" or a "poke" can turn around and either "like" - or possibly "poke" - me back.

(THIS POST IS NOT SPONSORED BY OR AFFILIATED IN ANY WAY WITH MEUNDIES, THE SOFT, COMFORTABLE, EXTREMELY AFFORDABLE UNDERWEAR PERFECT FOR EVERY BODY.)

Sources:

• Article: Information Commissioner's Office, (2016) "ICO investigation reveals how charities have been exploiting supporters"
• Article: MIT Technology Review (2013) "Big Data Gets Personal"
• Article (PDF): Jay, R. P., (2014)"Data Protection & Privacy 2014" 
• Website: Information Commissioner's Office (2016) "Actions We've Taken"
• Website: United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1998
• Website: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse