If My Data Is an Open Book, Why Can't I Read It?
By NATASHA SINGER May 25, 2013
OUR mobile carriers know our locations: where our phones travel during working hours and leisure time, where they reside overnight when we sleep. Verizon Wireless even sells demographic profiles of customer groups - including ZIP codes for where they "live, work, shop and more" - to marketers. But when I called my wireless providers, Verizon and T-Mobile, last week in search of data on my comings and goings, call-center agents told me that their companies didn't share customers' own location logs with them without a subpoena.
Consolidated Edison monitors my household's energy consumption and provides a chart of monthly utility use. But when I sought more granular information, so I could learn which of my recharging devices gobbles up the most electricity, I found that Con Ed doesn't automatically provide customers with data about hourly or even daily use. Robert McGee, a spokesman for Con Ed, suggested that I might go down to the basement once an hour and check the meter myself.
Then there is my health club, which keeps track of my visits through swipes of my membership card. Yet when I recently asked for an online log of those visits, I was offered a one-time printout for the year - if I were willing to wait a half-hour.
Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an "open data" society. In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.
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