Every data point is a person
Are our data systems designed to understand people, or just to measure them?
The Data Human Index scores brands on five dimensions: transparency, consent, clarity, control and empathy. Every score is published with the reasoning behind it, so it can be argued with rather than simply believed.
The Data Human Index
How human does a brand's data experience actually feel?
Most brands say they respect your data. The Index measures whether they actually do, using only what any user can observe, in about twenty minutes. One question per dimension, scored zero to four, no inside access required.
Transparency
How many clicks to the privacy policy?
Consent
Are accept and decline equally easy?
Clarity
Could a person actually read it?
Control
How many clicks to delete your account?
Empathy
Can you reach a human?
Data practices are built around the brand's needs. Expect dark patterns, buried controls and walls of legal text.
Genuine effort is visible but gaps remain. You can navigate it, but you have to work for it.
Real care across most dimensions with one or two weaknesses. Thinking about experience, not just compliance.
Transparent, respectful and genuinely designed with the user in mind. Data as a relationship, not a resource.
Real scores, real brands
Same industry. Completely different stories.
Facebook and TikTok, a point apart on the total and nothing alike in shape. Scored one dimension at a time, in a private browser window, using only what any visitor can see.
Ceiling scores on Transparency and Clarity. Floor scores on Consent and Control. The information is there but the power is not.
The only brand in the dataset to score zero on any dimension, yet account deletion is easier here than almost anywhere we have scored.
The score is just the starting point. The shape is where the story is.
Latest writing
Short essays on behaviour, trust and the human side of data
Where data-driven systems succeed, where they fall short, and why so many experiences feel out of sync with what people actually expect.
Ideas in progress
The ideas here are not presented as finished answers. They include behavioural signals, ethical personalization, trust-centred design, and a concept called The Consumer Hypocrisy. They are evolving, and explored in the open.
About
Fifteen years of building things, watching them succeed and fail, and asking the same question from every angle.
Read the storyScore a brand
Enter an address. It measures what it can from the outside, hands you the rest, and shows its reasoning either way.
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Think a score is wrong, or know a brand the Index should be looking at? Tell me.
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