Know Thyself

Over at Concurring Opinions, Frank Pasquele blogs on a presentation by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur on privacy in cyberspace. He made a bunch of interesting points, but I thought his most interesting demand was this:

You should know more about yourself than anyone else knows about you.

Consumers should have the right to find out what data is being collected about them. As a consumer, you should be able to go to DoubleClick, AdBrite, Advertising.com, Google, Yahoo, Aggregate Knowledge, etc. and a list of all the websites that track you. You should be able to go to Choicepoint, Experian, Acxiom, Rapleaf, etc. and see all the data they collect on you. . . . And you should be able to access this data for free at anytime.

I had never thought of this. But now that it's been said, it strikes me as completely intuitive. Nobody should have more information on me than I do. Why shouldn't this be a rule?