Mark Little, Principal Analyst, Consumer, Ovum

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it,” Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy is quoted as saying at a product launch back in 1999. McNealy will surely have grown almost as tired of hearing his famous quote as consumers appear to be of being tracked on the Internet, and Ovum’s latest Consumer Insights survey suggests that two-thirds of the Internet population is very tired indeed.

Internet players and data collectors of every type are at risk of taking the consumer’s personal data, their “little data,” for granted, turning the Big Data value system into a battleground.

Regulation and hardening attitudes are squeezing the supply of personal data

Since Scott McNealy made his famous quote there have been many privacy infringements and policy errors. These have mostly involved major players, and notable examples include Google Street View’s covert collection of consumers …