In a digitised world, personal identifying information (PII) has emerged as both a critical business asset and a source of heated debate.
While privacy advocates sound alarm about data exploitation, a nuanced examination shows how responsible PII utilisation can create meaningful value for businesses and consumers.
The evolution of PII monetisation in the West offers good lessons. Facebook (now Meta) pioneered the "attention economy" model, transforming seemingly mundane personal data - likes, shares, and demographic information - into a sophisticated advertising ecosystem.
This platform demonstrated how aggregated PII could deliver hyper-targeted advertising while offering users a "free" service, creating a new form of data-driven value exchange.
Oracle's approach differed significantly, focusing on enterprise-level data enrichment. Through strategic acquisitions like BlueKai and DataLogix, they built a massive data marketplace that connects offline and online identities.
This B2B model showed how PII could be enriched and monetised while maintaining arm's length relationships with end consumers.
Acxiom perhaps best exemplifies the industrial-scale potential of PII monetisation. Their infrastructure processes billions of consumer records, creating detailed profiles that enable everything from fraud prevention to marketing optimisation.
Their success underscores how PII when properly managed, can simultaneously serve commercial interests and legitimate business needs.
As global privacy regulations evolve, we are witnessing the emergence of "on-continent" data players developing models better suited to local contexts and regulatory frameworks.
In Africa, a new stock of start-ups are pioneering new approaches to PII utilisation that prioritise a more equitable value chain.
They are taking this on by developing models that better align with local cultural understanding of privacy and data sharing; creating clear, immediate benefits for data sharing, and establishing foundational data systems that can support multiple services while maintaining regional data sovereignty.
The value proposition for PII utilisation rests on several key pillars such as service enhancement that unlock; personalised user experiences, improved product recommendations, streamlined customer service, fraud prevention and security to economic benefits such as reduced customer acquisition costs, more efficient market matching and creation of new service categories and onward to societal impact with better public service delivery and more efficient resource allocation.
While the benefits are compelling, responsible PII utilisation requires robust risk management covering implementing privacy-by-design principles, maintaining transparent data practices, regular security audits and updates, clear value exchange communications, and compliance with evolving regulations.
The future of PII utilisation lies not in unrestricted data collection but in creating transparent value exchanges that benefit all stakeholders.
As regional players start to emerge and global best practice changes, we are likely to see more sophisticated models that balance commercial interests with personal privacy. The rise of the participatory web will shape many of these conversations.
The key to unlocking PII's full potential lies in shifting the narrative from data exploitation to value creation. The challenge now is to develop frameworks that will ensure this value is equitably distributed while maintaining robust privacy protections.
Mbugua Njihia is Venture Builder and Solution Architect