By now, there are hundreds of examples of companies founded on the Web 2.0 / User Generated Content paradigm. Apart from Quora itself, the list features Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Scribd, SlideShare, and so on.
But, when this paradigm was just emerging in the early 2000s, I thought Jigsaw was the most compelling example of it.
Now a part of Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business and renamed to Accurate Business Information and Company Profiles from Leading Business Data – Data.com, in circa 2005 this startup created a marketplace where people could buy and sell business contact details with one another and the platform.
I had exactly the same question at the time and I wrote a blog post entitled Make Money by Sharing Your Contacts – Whose Rolodex is it Anyway? Here’s a relevant passage from this post:
Of course, there are some tricky privacy and confidentiality issues that banks and other businesses will have to sort out before proceeding full steam ahead with such a business contact marketplace. … when a person acquires a contact in the course of performing his work for his employer, would uploading this contact to the contact marketplace amount to a breach of the confidentiality clause in his employment agreement with his employer? All this brings us to the basic question, Whose Rolodex is it anyway?
The founder of Jigsaw read this post and replied back to me via email. Since his reply was private, I can’t quote it here.
But, suffice to say, I’d have been prompted to reply to your question with “Gute Frage, Naechste Frage”, and move on. Translating to “Good Question, Next Question”, this is the go-to response in Germany whenever you ask someone a tricky question or a question to which there is no answer.
But I won’t give this answer and I won’t move on.
That’s because I recently saw a post on Twitter that had a very novel take on this subject.
According to this tweet, your name and date of birth are registered in your birth certificate, and your address is registered in your house sale deed or rental agreement. Now these documents are public records.
Ergo, most of what we hold sacrosanct as “personal information” in the context of privacy protection laws are actually not personal at all.
In the light of this new insight, I’ll reply to the original question as follows:
If business contact details are personal data, then they are not personal data anymore.
If business contact details are not personal data, then they are not personal data anyway.
So, either way, business contact details are not personal data.
I’m no privacy law expert but I couldn’t resist sharing the above logic, which sounds like it just came straight out of my most favorite book Catch 22.