RE: [projectvrm] What can people do with data that companies can't?

["T.Rob" < >]

Hi Doc,

The post mentions "You could present that data to your insurance company or
health care provider to get better rates and services from both."  I would
like to toss an idea out for consideration: framing.

When the credit card companies were getting started, they had to figure out
how to get paid.  The plan they hit on was to charge the merchant a
percentage of the transaction.  But they knew that consumers would not use
the cards if the fee was passed along as a  surcharge.  So they made a rule
that the consumer could NEVER be charged more for using the card.  So what
many companies did (and gas stations routinely do to this day) is instead
offer a discount for cash.  The result is exactly the same - the consumer
using the card bears the differential cost - except that one framing is bad
for card issues and one is good.

A more recent example of this is the net neutrality debate.  Not having
learned from the credit card example, the initial proposal was to allow
throttling of certain types of traffic.  That went over like a lead balloon.
The next iteration offered instead to allow content providers and users to
pay for higher quality of service.  This received MUCH less opposition,
despite that the two plans are the exact same thing, but framed differently.

I suspect that people would be up in arms if their insurer *required* them
to hand over health data or else pay a higher rate.  But they'd be pleased
as punch to hand over the same data in return for a discount.  It's the same
thing.  The main difference is whether the majority participate or not.  We
saw this with grocery loyalty.  At first it represented a discount.  Today
it represents the base price and you pay a 25% premium to keep your data
private.  The difference is in the degree of participation and in the
framing.  When a few people turn over their quantified self data to
insurers, it will be a discount.  When the majority opt in, you'll
effectively be paying a premium to opt out.  When almost everybody are opted
in insurers will be able to raise that opt-out premium to usurious levels,
essentially blackmailing you for your data.

For every use to which we can put our data I'd invite people to experiment
with the framing.  If you would reject the idea of being required to provide
your health data, then you should also reject the idea of selling it for a
discount, provided you see it as a matter of framing.  Of course, if the
insurer or provider is going to return value other than monetary for that
data - for example, they aggregate it into a very large scale population
study with published results, or they provide analytic services that aren't
possible without the data - that's another story.  But I would suggest that
money is the worst possible incentive for VRM or Personal Clouds because it
always reduces to framing.

What I'd MUCH rather see is that the insurer provides the application that
crunches my data in my personal cloud.  There are a couple of possible
models here.  One is that the app is so useful that people go to that
insurer to get access to it.  The other is that people pay a subscription
for use and support of the app.  What the insurer gets is higher margin if
people gain insights which reduce their risk.  The app would run in the
user's personal cloud, crunching their data privately and sending nothing
back to the insurer.  Only after providing this analytic functionality to
the insured might the insurer then offer to provide some additional benefit
in return for data, and I'm not even sure that's a good idea, even after
providing the analytics app.  Perhaps if it was anonymized and had no effect
on premiums...  

-- T.Rob


-----Original Message-----
From: Doc Searls 
[mailto:
 ]
 
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 9:54 AM
To: ProjectVRM list
Subject: [projectvrm] What can people do with data that companies can't?

That's what I ask, and partially answer, here:

<http://hvrd.me/14jYxGn>

Prompting this was a question from a major publication. Improve my answers
there, or provide your own elsewhere (including here), and our case will be
that much better.

Thanks,

Doc=