Take the test with your favorite retail chain, you will be surprised in two ways. If the company is transparent, you will get a list of all your purchases, with the date, the quantity of each item, its price and the means of transaction, in addition to your personal data. Otherwise, you will only get your last name, first name, etc., which means nothing, even though everything is stored in the computer systems and used to send you follow-up emails, promotions, etc. whose content has been personalized based on your data, your interactions on the brand's website, your purchases, etc.

Why such a difference ? Company No. 2 considers that it is fulfilling its duty by limiting itself to the strict definition of personal data. Legally, there is probably nothing to complain about, whatever ..., but from the point of view of the user, that's another story. Bad faith creates doubt among consumers. This does not necessarily mean that we will no longer go shopping there, but the image of the sign will take a hit. It becomes a story of perception. Why hide from us what we already know? For fear of what we might discover and understand? It's a risk to take. Why consider it a risk if the company complies with the regulations and the uses it makes of our data are legitimate and transparent?

Risk management for an organization is most often neglected, at best limited to the financial domain of the activity (eg banks, consumer credit organizations, insurance, etc.). Consumer satisfaction is not considered an element of risk by organizations. At best, it is an indicator whose weight remains negligible in strategic decisions.  

The time has yet to be considered that it is the customers who must follow and accept everything from their brands, and not the brands who must listen to their community. This is to forget two important factors: the first, that of the regulations of the states which are organized slowly, certainly, but which little by little legislate the practices; the second, that of the information society in which we have lived for 10 years (whistleblowers, social networks, influencers, media, etc.) and which no longer allows a scandal to be concealed.

Today, consumers are asking for transparency and benevolence in exchange for the data they entrust. It is the new economy that does not speak its name, the one in which the customer is the product and the beneficiary. He therefore naturally has his say in history.

So rather than waiting for the moment of truth, companies have every interest in anticipating the wishes of consumers and users. Showing white paw, isn't that a profession of faith for trust and transparency? To tighten the bonds rather than to see them tear, without possible return, seems to be the best bet to make.

The scandals linked to Facebook, for example, or the new privacy policy of WhatsApp (which also belongs to Facebook) have seriously impacted the image of the company. For the American giant, it was necessary to maneuver intelligently, to communicate, to change its image, and to make its mea culpa publicly. In France alone, the majority of French people would not trust social networks despite intensive use. The damage is done. No one questions the usefulness of these services (social networks, search engines, service platforms, etc.), but the mistrust is there. The most informed use them despite their doubts, perhaps while waiting for something better. The others continue to use it without knowing. However, knowing what is done with our data, for what, by whom, how and where, has become essential, as is knowing the environmental impact of a company or the presence of pesticides and other chemicals in our food. But who reads the privacy policies? Anybody.

Failing to read and understand technical jargon (most often in English), accessing your data allows you to have an overview of what is happening and to begin to question yourself in full knowledge of the facts.

Free for users, companies that distribute targeted content (advertisements or ads) pay a subscription to access user profiles and manage their advertising campaigns. Out of curiosity, one of us experimented with access to his data by exercising his right from the platform.

An avalanche of surprises awaited us. First, we had to wait 20 minutes to receive a link by email inviting us to download our data. Twenty minutes is long, very long ... it is more than enough to have time to forget that we are waiting for a response from the platform. And you shouldn't expect to find the email the next day in your inbox, because it will have been drowned among a whole bunch of other emails… After the wait, the moment of truth. A click on the link, a few seconds to establish the connection to the folder containing the data and the download finally starts. It took a long time to get this data back! No wonder we said to ourselves, since it's been a long time since there was an account, so there must be a bunch of data! And indeed, we were not disappointed! It is much more than his personal data that he recovers, it is about twenty csv text files summarizing quite well, but not completely, the activity of our friend tester: keywords which were used for it. target with advertisements, relations on the platform, declared data (training, gender, age, etc.), invitations and messages received, saved job advertisements, etc.

Nugget n ° 1 - We find the IP address from which he created his account in 2010. This allows us to go back to his Internet Service Provider at the time and even the place of connection ...

Nugget # 2 - Equally amazing, no trace of the phone number he entered when registering. How come the number has disappeared? Did an employee leave with it?  

Nugget n ° 3 - We discover an example of what the platform does with his personal data. They are used to target it with specific business content (advertisements and sponsored advertisements). We even have a list of the companies that used his data. However, nothing on the publications he “liked”, or those on which he clicked, nor the comments he left or shared with other members of the network and how companies were able to use this information. behavioral.

Conclusion - Apparently, the platform plays the game transparently, since the user can exercise their rights from a dedicated page. Unfortunately, we regret that the result is incomplete. The next step will be to legitimately claim the missing data, but this time going through Dare because our colleague can directly discuss with a natural person in the network and detail his request and his expectations.

This sign provides the most daring web-speleologists with an email address to write to to exercise their rights. It takes 4 good weeks to receive a response asking us to provide proof of our identity, although we have provided names, first names, postal address, customer number, etc. in our request. But so far, nothing abnormal with this answer. Indeed, the majority of companies require proof of the identity of the requester, and rightly so, since it is not a question of our information being shared with a third party. So we do and ... we are still waiting for a response to our request sent in winter 2020.

Here, neither a dedicated page nor an email found on the platform (however, searching has become the specialty of some at Syned), but rather a form to be completed online with predefined fields, which is very restrictive to specify our request. We never knew where the recipient of this form is, or if there is a real person at the other end ... So, since October 2020, we are waiting for a sign of response ...

Right to access your personal data held by a company. A copy of your data is then sent to you in a human-readable format (text files, spreadsheet, csv, etc.).

A company that gives you your data is not required to erase it. If this is what you want, consider exercising your right to be forgotten , knowing that you will probably not be able to benefit from its services afterwards. If you want to continue to use the service in question with the minimum amount of data, please turn to your right to object .

The companies that respond to you on Dare are present for the sake of transparency, precisely because they want to control their image with their community. They are therefore there to listen to you. It's up to you to assess the quality of their responses and actions.

When you retrieve your data from a company, you find it in your secure vault (My data) to do with it what you want: consult, delete, keep, share with another company by exercising your right to portability .

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On Dare, exercising your rights with Syned is as easy as unlocking your phone! Go to My Account / My Data, you will find all your rights there in one click. As a precaution, and for your security, we ask you to enter your password each time. Each time you exercise a right with Syned, you are notified by email of the application of your right in our systems.

Illustration proposed by CNIL

Official text of European regulations provided by the CNIL