Did you know your pants could be worth up to $100k or more?

The pants you bought at the mall this past weekend may not be worth $100,000 themselves, but all of the data surrounding those pants you just bought very well may be. Picture this: You pull

up to the mall and you park a few rows away because it is somewhat crowded on the weekend. You go into the mall and spend 10 minutes at one store but don’t buy anything, 5 minutes at another

couple of stores without buying anything, and then spend 20 minutes at your favorite store and buy a new pair of pants (after trying them on of course). After that, you stop for a coffee at

the Starbucks inside the mall or maybe a cinnamon roll from Cinnabon. You leave the mall and are on your way in roughly 90 minutes time. In that 90 minutes you have delivered valuable

information and insights to over 400 firms that are collecting “alternative data” from inside and outside the mall — without even realizing it. Satellites monitoring traffic in the parking

lot you parked in, geolocation from your cell phone being used to analyze the path you took when you entered the mall, the receipt from the purchase of your pants being combed for contact

information as well as purchase trends amongst other shoppers. This information is all being collected and analyzed, then sold off for thousands and thousands of dollars. But to who? And

how? Leslie Picker, a reporter for CNBC, went live on Squawk Box this morning to take a deeper look and connect the dots to the way firms are collecting data and who they are distributing

their findings to on the back end. Here’s what she found: THAT’S RIGHT, HEDGE FUNDS TODAY ARE SPENDING MORE THAN $1B ON DATA! Historically people have known some of this information gets

sold to companies for marketing purposes, however, they did not realize the most aggressive buyers are really the massive hedge funds looking for a trading edge. While their desire to gain

an edge via data and insights is understandable, the way they are going about it is a very gray area. They firms say the data is anonymized but there are also firms out there who can go one

step deeper and connect dots, like matching credit card transactions with store sales to find out exactly who is doing what. In which case, I believe this whole practice creates a very

slippery slope. If firms are going to be collecting, and selling, data they should be held accountable for exactly what they are collecting, when/where they are collecting it, and how they

are collecting it. There should be more regulation put into place that requires them to be accountable for what they are doing, especially in case of any kind of breach or mishandling of

information. GDPR continues to play the role of the gold standard for this kind of regulation and I continue to advocate more regulations like it to be into place on both a local and

national level. I firmly believe more regulations like the CCPA should be implemented on a state by state basis as well, uniquely covering the responsibility of data management. I’m very

interested in getting your thoughts and keeping this conversation going. Do you think companies should be able to collect this kind of data? Do you think there should be more regulation on

data collection, even if the data is anonymized? — — Thank you for continuing to read my posts and share your thoughts. My true passion is connecting with new people, so please share The

Governance Guru Medium page and connect with me on Twitter at @GovernanceGuru. I look forward to meeting you! -TGG