But rather than grieving over what BigCos do with our privacy, or getting straight exactly what Facebook is up to, I’d prefer to create tools that give us — each of us, natively — selective disclosure policies that we can pass along to the membership organizations of the world.

We’re so used to living in vendor habitats that we can barely imagine having real power and control in our relationships with them — for their good as well as our own. Selective disclosure has always been a basic tenet of VRM.

Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.

- Doc Searls in Power to the person

A friend emailed me a link saying ‘you won’t like this’.

An Australian accounting software developer blames a “severe downturn in sales” on people who bad-mouthed its products in online user forums. It wants a judge to muzzle their comments.

Apart from being a serious contender for the Darwin Award – seriously, suing people for making comments about its products and services! – it is also a company with a mindset I ranted about recently.

Let’s have a look at the offending ‘word of mouth’:

Among the challenged statements are incendiary comments such as these:

If you deal in Foreign Currency at all, I would avoid it. It was one of the big issues we faced … and don’t get me started on the inventory and manufacturing system – what a joke.

and

I was put onto this forum recently after discussion with peers, about how frustrated, dissatisfied and ultimately ripped off I feel after purchasing 2clix earlier this year … Our company has been trying to implement 2clix for sometime now and we are still in the implementation process and feel like we are getting nowhere fast.

These are very mild comments indeed. They would hardly register on the heat scale in most flame wars in the blogosphere. So on top of a company that has bad products and services and doesn’t know how to treat its customers, we also have a software developer that has no clue about the web and the conversations it spawns.

And now for the good news:

Since January 2Clix has suffered a “severe downturn in sales” that cost the company about $750,000 over six months, according to the 2Clix complaint, which was filed in the Supreme Court of Queensland. (All currency amounts are in US dollars.)

Here we have the holy grail of quantification of the word of mouth! The marketers of the world rejoice! Not quite. The good news is that the impact can be significant and lasting. Started by a few comments by ‘unimportant’ people. This is a power of sorts, although not yet harnessed. It can be amplified by more tools and understanding of what’s going on. Similar to blogs capturing, networking and scaling the conversations that people have always had, and similar to social networks connecting people through their profiles and relationships, there are ways to do this to our interactions with businesses and markets. Preferably without silos, lock-ins and closed platforms.

It often seems to be that people forget the power starts from the individual. It is not merely about scale and aggregation. I am reminded of Doc’s post Power to the person, which strongly resonates, for obvious reasons.

On the way to the airport this morning, my wife and I were talking about one of the big easily-defaulted misunderstandings of the VRM concept: that power for people only comes in numbers, in aggregation. The problem is with the word “only”. Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.

Bob Garfield in AdAge:

Is this company so frantic to seize market share on voice and broadband that it is willing to disrupt customers’ lives, fail to appear, repeatedly lie to them, walk out on them and then treat the customer as if he or she is a nuisance?

Well, we shall see. This is the Listenomics age. We will not take it quietly.

Here, here and here.

But, Hugh, where is the pain?

I believe in being free to be oneself, in challenging ideas of ourselves in order to find out who’s really there and in daring to be bold in the face of change and criticism because there is no greater reward in life than the freedom to find out who we are not and to infinitely discover ourselves in the becoming of it.

I live for adventure and warmth, belonging and being equal and part of that expresses itself through arts which are all other parts of having a voice out loud to myself before the world if it so chooses. The first bite of my own pear, though, is mine.
- Donna Williams, a friend of Alec’s

Rapleaf is contrite.

We made lots of mistakes. And this is a long post that, in great detail, goes over our mistakes and what we plan to do about them.

They explain what they do, why it’s scary and how to make it less scary, in their opinion:

There is a lot of information about people living on pockets all over the web. Everyone has an online/web footprint. And it is accessible if someone really wants to research someone – the information is publicly available – but it takes a lot of time to find.

Rapleaf automates this search process. We search billions of pages on blogs, social networks, forums, etc. for information on people. And a little over a month ago, we started making this information public on Rapleaf.com

Some people did not understand how we found their info and were worried that this info was going to be public, even though the info was already public. Others were concerned that their info was just plain wrong. The common denominator was not understanding where this info was coming from.

Yesterday we cooked up an idea to solve this – we are going to tell you where we obtained the info. Essentially all info will be attributed to a source and that way you can correct it at the source. We haven’t started coding this yet, but look for this change in the next few weeks.

And here is the falling on sword bit:

Last week we also made a decision to send the “you’ve been searched” emails to people that were searched for in Upscoop, a service we run that allows you to upload all your friends and find out what social networks they are on. In retrospect, this was really stupid and very wrong for doing this without any controls. Very very wrong. But at the time, it seemed like a really good idea for some reason. The problem is many people who use Upscoop were unaware that their contacts would receive a courtesy email.

Again, we were wrong. Now we iterate. And we ask for forgiveness.

So, admission of being wrong, check, apology, check, but what it is that they sell and make money out of? This is the bit that got me foaming at the mouth last week:

Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. At the other end of the business, TrustFuse packages information culled from sites in a profile and sells the profile to marketers. All three companies appear to operate within the scope of their stated privacy policies, which say they do “not sell, rent or lease e-mail addresses to third parties.”

And that’s right. Marketers bring TrustFuse their own list of e-mail addresses to buy access to demographic, behavioral and Internet usage data on those people, according to the company’s privacy policy and sales documents.

So are Rapleaf, Upscoop and TrustFuse doing evil or not? From their blog post:

People that are doing lots of searches on a monthly basis pay a little bit of money per lookup. This is how we generate revenue.

And we’ll even give heavy users the ability to do batch lookups and provide aggregate reports of the information. And yes, these heavy users and companies may use this information for marketing purposes to give their users and better offers when they visit their sites.

In the post Auren demonstrates he understands the importance of context. My problem is that I am not seeing the context of Rapleaf, their products and services. Who are they aimed at? If at companies and their marketers for the purposes of matching their email lists with online profiles than the whole mea culpa exercise doesn’t address my original objection.

But to be fair to Rapleaf and the likes of them, they are merely tapping into the demand they see from companies to ‘regain control over the consumer’. It is about collecting data and information on the elusive demographics. At arms-length and without any intention to treat their customers as individuals. And that is my gripe.

Yeah, I signed. Happily.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

I do like it. Especially, the ownership, control and freedom over my own data principles.

I was happy to see a call for the ability to export any data online by their owners… very much in line with what we are trying to evangelise with Project VRM in all areas.

We are social beings who need connection.
Connection happens when stories overlap.
Mindsets further entrench isolation.
Isolation kills.
- Dave the Lifekludger

Corporate logos are blemishes on cultural artifacts.
- Groundhog Day

taking this shamelessly from Doc’s quote du jour. Too good to miss.

A wise statistician’s approach to data:

…if you were the military and looking to reinforce your planes, where would you put the armor?

The solution is obvious.

I am in a sort of alternate reality. No, I don’t mean the online one, that’s the one I am normally part of. I mean skirting the edges of a Kafkaesque plot involving Salesian order, a well-known theology lecturer also an anti-communist dissident reporter, a disturbed woman, potential mis-diagnosis and forced medication, corruption and/or other dark motivations, and most likely politics.

No wonder I normally stick to online existence!