Ryan O’Toole talks with the San Jose Mercury News’ Chris O’Brien about “The case for oversharing” your financial data–at least when it’s anonymously aggregated on behalf of community interests:
“[Banks] know quite a bit about how we spend our money,” O’Toole said. “And they can mine a lot of this data. And they give that information to businesses and governments to support their agendas. We’re really disenfranchised from really working with that same data.”
This project is moving out of the ivory tower and into two pilot programs O’Toole is launching. The first is in South Wood County, Wis., where a local community foundation and O’Toole will create a site for people to share information about their income and their charitable giving. The hope is that by seeing what proportion of income people donate, others will be motivated to give more.
The second pilot is in Bucks County, Pa., where O’Toole and a local foundation will ask residents to post their natural gas bills online. They hope that by sharing that information, residents will be motivated to reduce their own use, and cut the county’s carbon footprint dramatically.