Consumers are at the heart of every activity, yet they still don’t get their share of the cake. Our conversations and behaviors are the basis for large conglomerates’ business strategies. Marketing plans and sales pitches are decided after closely studying our interactions, either on social network portals or in the conducted surveys. We are the providers of the information and they have all the techniques to extract, manipulate and store that information. Still, not only we are unable to use it, we don’t even have access to the information and data which are ours. Privacy, vigorously guarded by individuals, is constantly intruded without our knowledge. One is often surprised while checking email accounts when advertisements that are relevant to the subject line of a particular mail are flashed along the sides of the email account. This is the level of intrusion, as we unknowingly keep giving out personal information that is converted into commercial dollars. Can we really quantify the cost of our privacy? There has to be a way out, else we as users will be taken for granted and used as data generators. It’s my data that is being used to predict the buying behavior of consumers like me. We are living in an age when almost everything is being pushed towards the consumer. That is the concept of a Push Market. But with the user in the center of the paradigm, it is sure to become a pull market, where the consumer will have his own choices and he will manage the process. His data will be his own and he will have all the information at his access that will help him in deciding the best deal for himself. We have to be aware of our power as consumers and make a place for ourselves in the profit sharing chain. Turning our data into capital that will be our own, requires a big leap, as changing systems takes ages. Visions and ideas of user centered ecosystems will be the building blocks for such systems that will eventually lead to the required paradigm shift.
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