Can Data go the Public Goods way?

We know Public Goods - we read about them in introductory economics. There are fishermen living around a lake that's become prone to overfishing, and now fishing it banned there. If one fisherman still goes out and fishes, it is his gain and everyone else's loss. If he does not go fishing, it's his loss and potentially, everyone else's gain. No prizes for guessing what happens. 

Now data, come to think of it, is getting easier to get. A whole lot of our lives right from our correspondence to reading to shopping lists to shopping to money have all become data. A whole lot of data sits in servers and the cloud, and at some permissible level of aggregation, all data can be and is sold. There is data about you that I have access to that you don't know I have access to - and this is still legal. Beyond what's legal, there's obviously a lot more that can happen. People can use this data, for good purposes (e.g. check, you have high heart-risk in your family, heart attacks peak in the winters, most happening within one hour of getting up, and you have run out of your medication...and so on) and otherwise (don't want to give examples here, but you get the drift, right from invasion of privacy to selling you crazy stuff to outright blackmail). So what will data operators do?

A lot of the data is just out there. There could be a traffic camera capturing your movements, your cell-phone operator knows where you are, social networks know what you like, search engines know what you search for, eCommerce guys know what you buy, and so on. The list is endless and includes your stock-broking-engine, your bank, your tax-software and everything app you have on your phone and every website you sign into. To make matters worse, all these guys are bombarding you with cookies that now know information across platforms and websites and try to make sense of it. 

There is the obvious risk of malpractice, data-leakage and hacking. And there are simpler risks like just the headache of irrelevant offers made to you, and others knowing what you are - which could be uncomfortable sometimes. There are Target-like examples of knowing too much. There could be violation of data-walls, the issue ot shared-devices and the joke about the wife who complains that the only thing my husband cleans at home is his browsing history! Or the cartoon about the wife who knows the surprise her husband has for her because the common PC is bombarded with retargeting ads for that gift. Mind you, this is before the internet of things hits us in our face.

Mature businesses don't want to use any data the consumer doesn't realize he's shared. But there are all kinds of companies out there at all stages of desperation. There are lax laws on this, one could always argue out a certain level of anonymity that is still insightful - in other words actionable and useful to a company. Today the cookie people get paid by the platform that gives them data as well as the platform that uses it. 

Now what does your crystal ball say? Can it go bad to the point that the Golden Goose of data is killed by some operators? Can consumers get miffed to the point that they (try to, it's tough) share data altogether, or at least lobby to get legislation around the use of data unless the operator has an explicit, simply-worded opt-in with a forewarning?    

What do you think?