We have heard a lot in the past few weeks about the travails of Facebook, as it became widely known that many millions of its user profiles had been,  for lack of a better term, hacked. That, in turn, brought Facebook’s advertising microtargeting capabilities into focus, creating more widespread privacy concerns.

But does the average data publisher have to worry about privacy? The short answer is yes.

Data publishers, including B2B data publishers, often control a wealth of extremely valuable data. Many data publishers don’t fully appreciate what valuable insights they could glean from their own data. Fortunately, data thieves haven’t figured it out either … yet.

The highest value data in a typical commercial database isn’t the data itself, it’s the information on what users are doing with the data. Knowing, for example, that the head of acquisitions at a public company was doing deep research on another public company, could be extremely valuable to certain people. Knowing that an executive suddenly started looking at job openings could be valuable. Knowing that five venture capital firms in three days had looked up information on a particular start-up could be extremely valuable. You get the idea.

We already sell some types of information about how users interact with data, and we do this with very little thought about how it might blow up in our faces. Much of our data is clearly quite sensitive and we’d never sell it, but what if somebody stole it?

Going back to 2013, Bloomberg came in for tough public scrutiny after it was revealed its reporters had used Bloomberg terminal access data to track an individual in order to write a story. That’s pretty tame compared to the recent Facebook revelations, but it shows there is often tremendous inferential data hiding in the intersection between our databases and how our customers interact with it. Monetize where appropriate. Protect where appropriate. But whatever you do, don’t ignore it. 

This article is adapted from the InfoCommerce blog.