Google recently opened up a dashboard for users of their apps to let you see what data they have about you. I use a number of services from them, Gmail, Blogger, etc., and it was amazing to see all the services I have listed there. In some ways it's a little scary how much Google knows about me. I was especially amazed to see all my search history listed there. I can see all my consolidated searches from my desktop, laptop, and phone. I can even remove some of the search data if I like, which I think is cool.
Whether you think this is a good or bad idea, I do think that this idea of showing your customers what data you have about them, and then giving them a way to manage it, is an idea that might start to be required in other industries. Especially those places that have privacy or identity information of a personal nature. I know I've love to be able to understand, and even manage, the data that my doctor, my banker, and even the credit agencies have about me.
If you deal with data about people, do you give them a way to manage that data, and possibly correct errors? I think you should, and my guess is that at some point it might be mandated that companies that offer accounts to their online customers disclose all the data they keep and potentially allow customers to remove data that they do not want used by the company.
Talk about potential problems with data history in your BI systems. Allowing customers to "remove" data at some point might create huge problems in applications that are expecting certain pieces of information. Can you imagine having to go through a large data warehouse or OLAP system and purge out some type of data that a customer didn't want you to have anymore? What about the issues of analysts assuming their results are based on data that might have been removed?
I'm not sure to what extent we want to allow people outside of company to manage the data we keep, but it is an interesting idea, and one I'm sure will be debated and discussed as we have more privacy issues with corporate data in the future.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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