Exploring personal data futures trading with design fiction based hybrid simulation

Abstract

Personal data underpins much of our digital lives with recommenders proposing products and services that themselves result from personal usage data analysis. The ownership and use of personal data is central to much current legislation in an ever changing commercial environment. Design fictions are utilized here to explore a future where consumers (termed ‘prosumers’) take ownership of their personal data and offer it to a marketplace of data buyers. Personal data trading offers a disruptive opportunity to empower the end user to realize the value of their own data using new electronic trading platforms that aggregate data in response to buyer requirements. An personal data exchange-based trading platform is described where data content classification determines a selling facade (or ‘persona’). Exploratory agent-based and system dynamics models emerge and are used to examine behavior, market dynamics and process flow within this fictional trading scenario.