The article seems to imply that the data is out there in a form or format provided via some centralised source. My immediate reaction was that is not how the social web or the Live Web works: a) data is generated by anyone and everyone and b) it’s messy and the context emergent.

Technology and tools should serve us better and help us, as individuals, to filter and structure that information. Somehow, even in the best case scenario, I don’t see everything on tap from a unified source. Or digested, which is an uncomfortable implication that leaps out of the piece at me.

For example, assessing environmental or health impact of anything is subject to years, decades even, of debate, controversy, lobbying, vested interest, political play… and so it seems to me that the only way I can get information clear enough for making decisions is to ’subscribe’ to a particular view via sources promoting it. Of course, I can get a more balanced take on everything these days by finding alternative views somewhere on the web but I am not sure I want to stand in the supermarket, trying to follow a potentially heated and complicated online debate about the impact of the washing liquid I am about to put in my basket. Can technology speed up and simplify this process to the point where it becomes practical, without losing context for delibration in the process? That is one of the questions I ask myself whenever I come across yet another tool to help us search, compare, aggregate or match information online.

That said, information about nutrients and other non-controversial data of interest to me is easy enough to provide and sadly, this is where most vendors do fall short of what’s possible with existing technology. The operative word here is non-controversial, which is the trojan horse of any implementation of such resource(s). I mean that even what is meant to be gathering of ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge can be controversial at times. Trying to do that with live streams of information means that the checks and balances must reside in the context, not the source itself.

At the more fundamental level, the web and information technology made data cheap. It is the context to data that got expensive, in time and social interactions. On the web the best context costs you time spent browsing and researching and/or time spent cultivating a quality network to supply you with context as you need it. Here I elaborate:

The web has removed physical limitations on space. Data was expensive to create, store and move around and now it is not. This made room for context, which is becoming at least as important as the data. In fact, it is what make data and information the skeleton, giving shape to the flesh and skin but it is no longer the whole body and finish. The important thing is that context can be provided only by a human mind. It cannot be automated - when creating or absorbing it.

Update: The Guardian advert making similar point with regard to media and interpretations of ‘facts’ one sees.

1. automated algorithms a la Google and the thousands aggreation sites,
2. trusted sources including vendors, manufacturers, even third parties and intermediaries, or
3. your network of friends aka social network

The answer is obvious.

It depends! We use all three at different points in our information gathering, sharing and exchange and transactions. The challenge for VRM is to understand advantages and disadvantages of all three and encourage development of tools that give me, the individual user or customers, the best of all three.

My bet is on no.3. I want to help individuals to capture both data and context on their own terms. This will give rise to another layer of knowledge that serves both the individual and his network. For example, I want to collect data about my shopping, with my own comments and with sources of information useful to me. I want to have pictures of products I have bought, links to reviews by others and my own, comments by friends in my network, record of interactions with the vendors and third parties etc etc. I want it in a place I can further analyse it and share it based on my privacy requirements.

With time, all this can become a source of better understanding of my own behaviour and preferences, and, with practice, a better negotiating position in future transactions. In other words, I will be the most authoritative source of my own history, with data, information and knowledge about me.

And that might change everything.

Young Girl-Old Woman Illusion

Bonus link: TED talk Chris Jones Picturing excess

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Yesterday at one of my client workshops I was explaining the benefits of Twitter - I use the term ’synchronicity maximised’ to describe the ad hoc organisation of encounters, connectivity and sharing that makes Twitter so useful and addictive. I mentioned an example of twittering my location - let’s say I am in New York having brunch with a friend and I let the ‘world’ know about it. One of the attendees remarked how creepy this seemed to her. And here we have the ‘creepiness factor’ - which usually refers to someone not necessarily violating our privacy legally but to the ability of others to gather our public details (as private data would be a privacy violation), piece together data and information about us that allow them to act in ways we don’t expect. It is the realisation that someone knows so much about us by deliberately gathering information and using to behave in a way that implies familiarity. It feel like a violation of autonomy and privacy, even though existence of either is a delusion in our mind.

There is a difference between me ‘broadcasting’ on Twitter that I am having brunch with a friend plus the exact location, and learning the hard way that someone is ’scraping’ or gleaning such information from places that I, probably very foolishly, consider private or even semi-private, such as Facebook. It comes down to me knowing what happens to my data. The creepiness comes from realising that someone is gathering and piecing together information about me for purposes that don’t directly involve me and/or are not in my interest. Twittering my location is not a problem if I am doing it with awareness of my network and audience.

Sometimes it seem that the vision of web of document turning into web of people has gone the other way around. It is turning the web of people into the web of information about those people without their ability to do much about it.

And of course, all this contributes to all the talk about privacy. And the view that the web is eroding it and that the younger generation don’t appreciate or value it or give it away and, and, and… I have a different view. I am a privacy freak myself and value my privacy highly although I have considerable online presence. That is because privacy is behaviour according to your own preferences - it’s a policy, not a system.

Below is my response to an overly legal approach to privacy on the project VRM mail list thread, where privacy was seen as a legal agreement and to be guaranteed by a contract. Here is what I said:

Yes, the whole legal thing is not addressing or even originating from the way people interact. Bemoaning the fact and trying to build systems, processes or tools that force people to ‘behave in their best interest’ or to ‘protect their privacy’ is not going to work and/or deal with the problem.

Privacy is a policy, not a system. ToS is a creature of systems, platforms and silos not of the individual/user/customer.

I, as an autonomous individual, am the best judge of my privacy requirements. When I talk to my friends, I know what to tell them and what not to share - and if I mess up, I suffer the consequences and learn not to gossip with those who betray confidences.

In a larger context, beyond my immediate social circles and when money or reputation or other value is at stake, in order to manage my privacy I need to understand the context and consequences of information I share or other have about me. But if my privacy is not up to me to manage, there can be no reasons or demand for such knowledge to be available or for me to find out easily. Hence, many people have no idea about how their data is used and abused. So that will is part of the challenge in which the web has helped enormously - it is now possible for a dedicated or persistent person to find out what’s going on most of time.

But there is little they can do to act on that knowledge - and I have said this elsewhere many times before - our privacy options are rather binary. Either you participate in transactions, exchanges, communities, etc and you give up some of your privacy or you don’t. However unacceptable I find the former, the latter is not the way to live either.

The best ‘privacy settings’ are in my head, but I need ways/tools that help me to ‘execute’ my privacy policy. And as it’s been pointed out these are not necessarily of the legal world. It helps not to assume it and start building tools that help individuals manage their data and help them to determine their privacy behaviour themselves.

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See here:

Now consider the new world of social networks. Facebook, unwittingly or on purpose, has been teaching people to manage their own data about themselves. Facebook’s launch of the Beacon service — which informs Facebook of members’ activities (i.e., purchases) on other sites — was a PR fiasco. But it still familiarized millions of users with the notion that they can control information about themselves online — and determine to whom it is visible.

And here:

Networking on Facebook, MySpace and other silos is like taking driving lessons. There is no recognisable direction. It seems kind of pointless unless you know that it is just learning and practising. Facebook and MySpace seems a lot like that to me. But once people work out how to drive, how to operate the machine and how to get from point A to point B, they will be able to decide what the B is and get around on their own. And that’s when the real fun starts.

And then here:

So the Mine! is an attempt to give people their own car, getting them to decide where they go with it, how fast and who they take along as passangers. They will have to look after it a bit and perhaps learn to maintain it but that will be easier with time too. It is an alternative for networked and social existence on the web for those ready and willing to break out of silos.

Nuff said.

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Follow up on previous thoughts on data and ownership… as cross-posted from VRM Hub.

Talking about ownership of data online in terms of control is fairly pointless. Once your data is out, it’s out. So instead of delving into the meaning of ownership and what it means in a decentralised, distributed and open network where sharing and transparency are default, let’s look at how the data is generated by the individual and shared through interactions with others.

Data as generated online is akin to a positive externality for the vendors and platforms that capture our data. Positive externality* is something that is not part of the value traded in market exchanges. It is something one of the parties in the trade benefits from, without having to pay for it. For illustration, pollution is considered a negative externality as it is

a) a by-product of manufacturing processes and,
b) is not included in the cost or price of the products.

So, when I am buying something from Amazon or Virgin Atlantic site, the explicit value exchange is the goods they provide and the money I pay for those goods. My data is external to that value exchange - the vendor is not paying for it and I am not being paid for it. In the current set-up (no pun intended), the vendors benefit by using the data in ways that help their business, from mining to selling it on. I, on the other hand, have scant legal protection against that and even with all the laws in place such as Data Protection Act and other restrictions on those who capture my data, a large portion of data collected from me is for marketing purposes.. and usually way above the threshold of legally required data to complete transactions.

The advent of the ‘free’ web has mightily confused the distinction between data as part of a value exchange and data as a positive externality - simply because most platforms with web services have turned what is essentially an external benefit from other exchanges to foundations of their business models. The ‘free services’ I receive are ‘paid for’ by my attention and/or my data - both eagerly gathered by various platforms. Advertising is a way to monetise my attention aka eyeball and the race to monetising my data (short of crude selling on) is still on.

In this context I own my data (in a way I own my attention) and neither should be considered a payment for the (free) web services unless it is specified in the terms of the exchange or service. It is merely a shift from one business model - online retail such as Amazon - to another where data becomes the value exchanged tacitly and without clear understanding. This is another reason why privacy remains an issue with such web services and platforms. As long as I have to depend on a third party to protect my privacy, it will be exposed by accident (incompetence), force (authorities) or abuse (marketing & advertising).

The tensions between the data created and managed by us and the tools we use belonging to someone else, are becoming obvious on the social web. Mike Arrington’s outrage a few months back when Facebook was turning its back on FriendConnect is justified.

The fact is, this isn’t Facebook’s data. It’s my data. And if I give Google permission to do stuff with it, I’m damned well within my rights to do so. By blocking Google, Facebook has blocked ME. And that, frankly, kind of frustrates me.

Let me put this another way. How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!

Arrington also condemns Scoble’s early attempts at ‘data portability’:

Scoble has been on the wrong side of this issue before, when he tried to scrape his friend’s contact information out of Facebook and export it to Plaxo. In that case, it wasn’t his data and he didn’t have the right to make it portable. It’s MY data, once again, and only I should be allowed to make that decision. He thinks his new position shows that he gets the importance of privacy, but once again he isn’t thinking in terms of who really owns the data and should be allowed to make decisions around it.

Here we go, ownership of data again. So when I add someone to my network, together with his photo and other profile details, I do not ‘own’ that data. It seems pretty pointless to debate that as whenever I sign-up to a social network platform, I am agreeing to the terms and conditions of their relationship with me and to what happens to my data, privacy etc. All my agreements are with the platforms and the way I enter those agreements is definitely lacking in balance of power. We do live in the early days of individual empowerement… but even so, there is a distinct lack of tools that will allow me to be a node in a network independent of someone else’s silo or a platform. I have the same question as Danny O’Brien:

When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first?

Moreover, within social networking platforms, there is no corresponding agreement with other users. The terms of service are between me and Facebook, me and MySpace, me and Twitter, me and Flickr, me and Plaxo, me and LinkedIn, me and the socnet du jour… but they do not extend to my relationships with other individuals on the same platform. Relationships are pre-defined, much the same way terms & conditions are, from the point of the platoform, not from the point of the individual. So ironically, social networking platforms designed to help me connect with others, to create and maintain relationships with them, are not allowing me to define those very relationships…

In other words, there is no way to interact with others within the silos based on what I call P2P terms and conditions. These could be privacy agreements, if we so wish, ranging from simply not-bothered-about-what-happens-to-my-contact -details-in-your-social-graph all the way to granulated preferences for different people in my contact list. So just like in the real world - there are people I’d trust with my address book and there are some I wouldn’t trust with my address. Instead of building complicated systems and using technology to make such nuances in relationships explicit, I need tools to help me manage the complexity of human relationships. I need tools to reflect what is already in my head implicitly and defines me as a social animal. Do not tie me up in legal pretzels over various policies, creating permissions and access management nightmares in the process. In the words of Kevin Marks as paraphrased from his Social Cloud talk at Lift08:

Software cannot match out ability to sort out our friends and contact, establish how much we trust them and how we arrive at that trust. No software can fully map the relationships, let alone replace our natural ability to create and maintain them The implication is that therefore software should support the kind of cloud abstraction we have around the internet, also around our social relationships. You can feed it (the social networking app) relationships that are in the ’software in your head’, feed the stuff related to people in your network to software online. Users will assume that your software (this is aimed at developers) will be able to see the information that they have already fed into the software and be able to use it.

Indeed! By I digress. To recap, my data is a kind of externality to purchasing transactions, just like attention is an externality to my reading, watching or listening to something else. Marketing lives off my data, advertising lives off my attention. My data (and by extension me) is not respected because companies can trade it as a commodity without paying for it. The way to address this is not to make them pay for the data (and create many snake oil intermediaries in the process) but to make it possible for companies to enter into relationships with the true owners of the data.

So what is to be done? How to internalise the externality? How do I regain control over something that originates from me and is used in my transactions with others? This is the stuff of VRM.

Broadly speaking, it is about finding tools & technology to give the individual sovereignty over his data, so he can exercise choice over who gets to see it and under what circumstances. This will change the balance of powers and eventually demonstrate to companies that respecting people’s data (and by extension them), they can make more money.

—-
* Definition of externality: Economic theory considers any voluntary exchange to be mutually beneficial to both parties, for example a buyer and seller. Any exchange, however, can result in additional positive or negative effects on third parties. Those who suffer from external costs do so involuntarily, while those who enjoy external benefits do so at no cost. Data is an externality without the third party, where the afffected party is also participating in the transaction. So not an exact theoretical match, but perhaps still helpful in understanding how we got to the point where ‘free services’ feel entitled to their users data.

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Here are some thoughts based on what I posted to the Project VRM mailing list on the discussion about data ownership:

The ownership of data, whatever that means, is merely a starting point of VRM and our attempts to redress the balance of power between vendors and customers. I might volunteer information - to me that means I share it on my own terms - but I also need the ability to establish and
maintain relationships. For that I (others may not) need and want
the following ‘functionality’:

1. take charge of my data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge),
2. arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to my needs and preferences and
3. share it on my own terms
4. whilst connected and networked on the web.

That’s what I mean when I talk about turning the individual into a platform, etc etc.

This does not happen by creating a database or a data store, however personal. Store implies passive and static, even with some sort of distribution. The objective is equipping individuals with analytical and other tools to help them understand themselves better and give them an online spring board to relationships with others (in VRM context this includes vendors).

I think it’s the user who should define the nature of the data stored/shared/analysed and what data is called what - whether confidential or premium or whatever. The crucial point is being able to share it (as well as do all sorts of groovy things with it, independently of third party and without the data being hijacked, er, harvested by third parties in the process.)

In the spirit of user-driven-ness, it should be the user who determines the ‘policies’ by which his or her data is managed and shared. I don’t see why they need to be standard(ised) as my sharing preferences and tolerance are a matter of my policy* - just like security and privacy are policies, not systems, i.e. what’s secure or private to me is not necessarily the same to you and vice versa.

What happens after information/data/whatever is shared is partly provenance of the law but mostly of a relationship I have with those the data is shared with… The main issue with the latter is that it can become meaningful only if the user is the most authoritative source of his or her data. Hence I call the means of doing this the Mine!…

—-
*My take on privacy is that it is a policy of the individual, not in a sense of privacy policy for the individual selected from a given selection, in the style of Creative Commons. Huge difference. For instance, I have a policy about who I let into my house. I don’t need to display it on my doors or attach it to my address or business cards. It is far more convenient and flexible for me to decide there and then, when someone’s knocking at the door. It is my implicit privacy policy that kicks in. Sure, I don’t want junk mail or door-to-door salesmen but just because I can display notices to that effect, doesn’t mean that is the way to deal with the rest of the humankind. So online, it is about creating tools that help the individual control the data to the point that he/she decides practically and directly who gets to see what - without a third party or intermediary…

cross-posted from VRM Hub

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This morning I commented on JP’s blog post on Wondering about damage and repair , where he applies a useful concept of comparing the cost of damage with the cost of repair to chewing gum. It transpires that the cost of chewing gum is 3p and cost of cleaning (by councils) is 10pm and therefore the full cost born by us all as taxpayers. The question is what can be done to balance this out, as it is the balance in the right direction that keeps things ticking over - such as Wikipedia for example.

Maybe it’s time for some radical solutions. Maybe we could try something else. If a good for sale is capable of damaging “the commons” then maybe we should measure the cost of repairing that damage. If that cost exceeds the cost of damage, then we raise a tax on the good until the cost of damage is higher than the cost of repair. Half the tax is payable by the manufacturer, half by the consumer. The taxes so collected are then used to do the repairing.

To me using taxes to influence such things is anathema, here is why:

Hm, to me the problem with the ’solution’ to chewing gum is trying to control behaviour through taxing it - a slippery slope indeed. Apart from the fact that even if it works, i.e. in aggregate people stop or start doing more of whatever the tax is designed to change, there are _always_ unintended consequences that cause further distortion(s) in the market. Just look at financial regulations.

But my real objection to using any tax to control behaviour is that is it paternalistic and shifts the relationship between the state and the people from one of servant-master to master-slave.

People don’t seem to differentiate between the state and society - two separate realms that relate to the individual in fundamentally different ways. The state is political and the society, well, social. One of the features of communism (or any totalitarianism) is the explicit aim to politicise the social. In such systems, everything is political and the power is taken away from the society and individual for political purposes. Therefore, I distrust and thwart the state wherever I can. I support and strengthen society to the best of my abilities.

A bit of a political theory overkill for a chewing gum issue, however, that is the reason my alarm bells go off every time I hear proposal to tax one thing or another to change or influence human behaviour. Social solutions are always better than political and taxation IS a political solution.

The cost of repair vs cost of damange is a brilliant framework for understanding why some phenomena work and others don’t. I am with DE on how to approach it - education and lower cost of clean up.

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When you take an idea or a concept and turn it into an abstraction, that opens the way to take human beings and turn them, also, into abstractions.
- Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel

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… of human creativity that for the last 50 years or so has been sucked out by TV and other cognitive heatsinks. Clay Shirky as always - making sense on stilts. Watch to hear how the Victorians got through industrialisation and the shock of it with the help of.. gin. More importantly, he addresses the stupid question I hear so often from those who don’t have a clue about what the online world is like and what drives people in it - “Where do people find the time?!” It is a variation on too much information and I have fought on that front for a while.

The answer Clay gives is that as options to TV and other passive engagements emerge, people switch away to participate and create. He argues that with the web we start to see cognitive surplus as an asset (creativy, innovation and participation) instead of something to be dissipated. I believe he is right, let’s hope our faith in humanity is vindicated.

The money quote: Here is what a four year old knows - a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken. Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for!
. Amen, brother.

via Johnnie

Here is Clay’s post based on his talk.

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Bruce Schneier on what keeps me awake these days.

In the information age, we all have a data shadow.
….

What happens to our data happens to ourselves.
….

Who controls our data controls our lives.
….

We need to take back our data.
….

This is a tall order, and it will take years for us to get there. It’s easy to do nothing and let the market take over. But as we see with things like grocery store club cards and click-through privacy policies on websites, most people either don’t realize the extent their privacy is being violated or don’t have any real choice. And businesses, of course, are more than happy to collect, buy, and sell our most intimate information. But the long-term effects of this on society are toxic; we give up control of ourselves.

This is why I want the Mine! and why I have designed it as a place where you can reclaim your data, without abandoning the goodness of connectivity and benefits of the network. As I keep saying in my email signature: The network is always stronger than the node… but a network starts with a node.

The individual needs to be stronger, more in charge of their domain. I believe that will improve relationships and transactions with others as well as bring benefits to the whole network.

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I have been thinking about my data and online data logistics a lot these days in connection with VRM infrastructure as I have been working on (Mine!). As an individual my relationship to my data can be described in matrix of several types of imprisonment. I am interested in building an option where this is not the case.

Jail with visiting rights - closed platform a la Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Amazon, Expedia, online bank statements and any site that doesn’t allow export of data in interoperable format. My data is under lock and key elsewhere, and I cannot get more than a view of it through the bars of the jail. For instance I would manually enter my profile or other data into a Facebook applications (and now a few ‘trusted parties’), but there is little or no hope that I could get the data back out again, other to save the JPEGs of the resulting output (screen grabs) - which decimate rather than reflect the value of the original input. Further, my data starts losing weight, as any inmate locked up. As the original data is never at my beckoning, only its representation is what I can play with.

House arrest - desktop applications for data management, iTunes, Excel spreadsheet, word processing, etc. Example, my music (ripped not bought from iTunes store) is my data is on my computer in a format that is hard to share with anyone. The software is not designed to enable sharing of data - the net result is my data is nominally under my control, but it is just as locked up as Facebook. (No export or no guarantee that exported data is in a mashable format)

Open prison - online data management tools, Wesabe, uploading from iPhoto or Picasa to Flickr.com. This means I can share (better than house arrest) but the data is centralised a little like Facebook (almost as bad as jail with visiting rights) and although the rendering tools are more advanced and, being centralised, can be upgraded without user intervention, there is still a big similarity to glimpsing my data which is held within the jail.

Out on bail - feed readers and online calendars, e.g. OPML, Google Calendar, iCal. The data is more or less yours and mostly under your control for export, import and sharing. But it can’t travel far and there is only so much you can do with it. It certainly can’t be mashed up with data in other formats or on other topics than calendar or feeds. (Dopplr lets you go furthest in combining calendar, Flickr and map data etc).

Out of jail - I hold my data on (explicitly) my resource for sharing; I can share my data beyond just what Flickr, del.icio.us etc provide as a tool to render my data, and in more places than just those platforms - for instance with a supermarket or gym or others (vendor?) who could benefit from knowing what I am eating and when I am exercising. In short: the Mine! enables controlled sharing beyond the Mine!’s own rendering itself. The bars are removed and your data can go where you desire it to.

Hm, to push the analogy further, doesn’t that make Plaxo Pulse, Friendfeed and other such aggregators a prison parade?

In case I haven’t made it clear enough, I want my data out of jail. By that I mean being able to exist online with four requirements met: take charge of my data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to my needs and preferences and share it on my own terms whilst connected and networked on the web. That is what the Mine! is designed for.

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I get edgy when I hear people talk about being user-centric. I once fell for it, thinking that they saw users’ wants as their starting point. Well, user-centric is an improvement on the system-centric approach where the top-down design forces users into a slot of whatever is built, no matter whether it works well or not. (Hence the phrase user-friendly applies mostly to things not designed for the user. I don’t talk about del.icio.us as being user-friendly, because its simplicity and functionality allows the user to drive the use, not the designer.)

User-centric says - ‘we are going to build a system, put the user in the centre instead of the system’. So far, so good, but this sits uncomfortably with me as a user especially as one that is used to the online tools that have changed many an old way. The tools - blogs, wikis, feeds and feed readers, BitTorrent, Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter etc - are revolutionary not just because of their functionality, bits of code or their interface, but their design for usefulness, their modularity and constant evolution. There is an element of open-endedness in their design, either accidental or deliberate, recognising that the designers cannot foresee all the uses to which people will put the tools to. The simplicity is the key, the complexity coming from usage rather than the design. In other words, they are user-driven.

A simple test of user-driven design is in the answer to a question - Can the user add value to it? Without users del.icio.us would pointless, BitTorrent empty and Flickr dead, Twitter silent.

Last year at the IIW in Mountain View, I got talking to Bob Frankston about the difference I started to see between the user-centric and user-driven. Bob, in his inimitable fashion, used the tuna salad we were having for lunch during the conversation to coin an analogy. A ready-made tuna salad is user-centric - it has been decided what goes into it, in what proportions and what order. It has been designed around me and for me but I cannot add anything to it.

Giving me ingredients, utensils and a recipe suggestion and letting me get on with it, leads to user-driven design- it can still be meant to become a tuna salad but I get to put it together, determine the proportions, skip or add ingredients. The process is driven by me and the experience makes me (hopefully) better at making the dish.

Of course, there are times for user-centric and there are times for user-driven. Not everyone wants to make everything themselves and neither is it the best or most effective way to design all systems or tools. But there are cases when only user-driven will do. And VRM is one of them.

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