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Personal Data and Privacy Issues and Postal Operators Stand

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The Future of the Postal Sector in a Digital World

Part of the book series: Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy ((TREP))

Abstract

Data has become the raw material of production, a new source of considerable economic and social value. Advances in data mining and analytics, the massive increase in computing power and data storage capacity coupled with decreasing cost (falling by a factor of 6 since 2005 according to Podesta et al. 2014) and the increasing number of people, devices, and sensors that are now connected by digital networks and able to communicate with each other (“Internet of Things”) have revolutionized the ability to generate, communicate, share, and access data. According to the World Economic Forum (2011), 15 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020. The amount of data stored on the Internet is predicted to grow exponentially and looks set to be 44 times larger in 2020 than it was in 2009 (World Economic Forum (2011), figure 3, pp. 14).

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position of La Poste. We thank Yassine Lefouili, Professor of Economics at Toulouse School of Economics; Michael Crew, Director and CRRI Distinguished Professor of Regulatory Economics at Rutgers University; Tim Brennan, Professor of Public Policy and Economics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); and discussants at the Rutgers conference, Margaret Cigno and Edward Pearsall, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other solutions could be self-regulatory measures implemented by firms to deal with their customers’ data (assuming that intense media scrutiny on personal data misuse creates a financial pressure on the business community roughly analogous to Pigouvian taxes) or a proactive policy enforced by public authorities.

  2. 2.

    In fact, the relationship between the degree of privacy protection and equilibrium profits is not monotonic: weak privacy protection generates higher profits than no privacy protection but strong privacy protection generates lower profits than weak or no privacy protection (having access to customer-specific knowledge on individual preferences makes it possible for each firm to differentiate its price among its own customers which promotes the firm’s profits compared with the prices the firm sets under strong privacy protection).

  3. 3.

    Nissenbaum (2011) speaks about the “transparency paradox”: the more that information is shared through notice statements, the less understandable those notice statements are for authentic consent by the user.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Doctrine et Modélisation, Direction of Regulation and Institutional and European Affairs, Groupe La Poste, Paris, France

    Claire Borsenberger

  2. Laboratoire d’Economie d’Orléans (LEO); and University François Rabelais, Tours, France

    Claire Borsenberger

  3. Department of Regulation and Studies, Direction of Regulation and Institutional and European Affairs, Groupe La Poste, Paris, France

    Denis Joram

  4. Direction of Digital Affairs, Groupe La Poste, Paris, France

    Olaf Klargaard & Philippe Regnard

Authors
  1. Claire Borsenberger
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  2. Denis Joram
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  3. Olaf Klargaard
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  4. Philippe Regnard
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Correspondence to Claire Borsenberger .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Michael Crew

  2. School of Public Policy, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, Maryland, USA

    Timothy J. Brennan

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Borsenberger, C., Joram, D., Klargaard, O., Regnard, P. (2016). Personal Data and Privacy Issues and Postal Operators Stand. In: Crew, M., Brennan, T. (eds) The Future of the Postal Sector in a Digital World. Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24454-9_17

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