I love Kinder Eggs, I live in Canada and have fond memories of my parents and relatives gifting these wonderful treats, two types of chocolate and a surprise inside, can it get any better? Well not if you live in the USA. In fact, In January 2011, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the U.S. border into Minnesota.
In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US$2,500 per egg. For consumers, this is a perfect example of regulations implemented for consumer safety – the toys in some countries are deemed as a choking hazard for small children. On the opposite end of the product spectrum, consumers now purchase products they can’t actually touch called apps. Some of these apps are pre-loaded in phones and computers you buy, as such in these cases the apps are paid for indirectly through your device purchase.
Your phone or PC is a product, the apps are products too, the apps produce and collect lots of data (also a new class of product) yet there are only a handful of laws that specifically target the practice of electronic marketing and data collection. The laws which are on the books are specific to the marketing channel in question (such as financial services or healthcare where your data is considered sensitive). This is the Kinder Paradox – a time when (in most cases) we properly regulate the physical product world (the products we touch) but have yet to catch up in terms of how to regulate the data world.
What can you do about it?
Think about apps you download, and the search engines you use and ask yourself, do I know this company? Who do they sell my data to? How is that data used? Can you turn data collection off? Hopefully, sometime soon, our regulators will catch up with laws that protect digital consumers in manner that allows us to engage digitally while being protected - similar to protections regulators implement in the manufacturing process around the products we buy in the physical world.
