New trend report: The Privacy Era

With so much of modern life occurring in the digital realm, more and more personal information is being captured online and traded between brands as a way to better understand their consumers. But what started as a way to make users’ lives easier by serving up convenient, personally relevant information has morphed into what’s perceived as a shady, underhanded economy of consumer data wheeling and dealing.

As consumers are nearing a breaking point amid increasingly frequent and severe data breaches—from the seminal Cambridge Analytica scandal to the massive Equifax credit breach to the September 2019 Ecuador data leak that compromised nearly the entire country—the dawn of a new era that prioritizes privacy is fast approaching.

“The Privacy Era” explores how, in response to rising consumer discomfort with the way personal information is tracked and traded online, a new data ecosystem is emerging, including a new value exchange for consumers, a fresh set of rules for brands and a repositioning of the digital identity as equal to the physical body.

Highlights from the report include:

The value of data

“Data has become the most valuable asset on planet Earth, yet all of us as individuals, the people who produce that asset, have no rights to its value at the moment,” data transparency advocate Brittany Kaiser tells Wunderman Thompson Intelligence.

As consumers are beginning to realize the value of their digital behavior and information, a new economy built around data is emerging, with data as the primary capital.

New business structures

As data privacy becomes a priority for consumers, the emerging infrastructure for ethical data use is fundamentally restructuring industries and business needs.

Intimate data

As consumers increasingly live online, the idea of data as a cold and impersonal series of zeroes and ones is falling away; instead, data is increasingly acknowledged as a deeply personal pillar of digital identities.

“Our digital and physical lives are merging and we need a digital identity solution that reflects this reality,” says Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard.

Digital self-care

With data security weighing on people’s emotional wellbeing, the latest brand initiatives are redesigning products and platforms to facilitate digital self-care and pave a healthier path forward through the data landscape.

“Privacy is one of those issues that’s constantly humming in the back of people’s minds—which, over time, can be just as, if not more, damaging to their psyche as major spikes in anxiety,” Joe Toscano, founder and chief vision officer at The Better Ethics and Consumer Outcomes Network (Beacon), tells Wunderman Thompson Intelligence.