This may be because people are realising how elusive privacy becomes as the web platforms are turning the screws on user data they have accumulated. I am looking at you, Facebook, though Facebook is not the only perp in town…

The first talk on the topic, which I enjoyed very much was the one I gave in June to the Oxford Libertarian Society. I tried to cover various notions of privacy and argued that privacy is to identity what freedom is to morality – the latter can’t exist without the former. Here’s the text in full.

Oxford Libertarian Society talk on privacy

My second recent talk on privacy was at LIFT France 2010, as part of the session called Privacy Revisited, Protect and Project with Daniel Kaplan, the founder of FING and Alma Whitten, Google’s Engineering Lead for Privacy. It is a sign of a good session where one learns much from the other speakers. After watching Alma’s interesting presentation, it occurred to me that in the world of web platforms and clouds, even ones that are trying to be benign, privacy boils down to something I should have opened my talk with…

Privacy is never having to delete things you don’t want anyone to see.

LIFT France Privacy

LIFT Privacy Talk

Here is a comprehensive summary of the evening by David Terrar.

Items for discussion:

1. Monthly VRM Hub meetings this year

   Do we change the format? If so how? Creating ’speaker slots’ for each meeting and opening it up? How about letting different people organise each meeting, etc?

2. An event or conference covering the topic interchangeably knowns as personal data, personal informatics, personal analytics, self-analytics, self-tracking etc

   Date: tba but ideally 1Q 2010 (though 2Q more realistic perhaps)
   Format: One day event, open space as well as some pre-determined speakers to make sure we meet those who are already active in this space (web apps etc)
   Venue: tba
   Supporters & sponsors: tbd

3. Anything else that comes to mind…
4. Pub

The sign-up page is here. We are meeting on Thursday 28 January 6-9pm, back at GfK NOP. Look forward to seeing you there.

The conversation was varied and under Chatham House rules so can’t talk about it in detail. What I can repeat here is my closing remark – a result of pervasive assumption that there should be identity provider(s) and my data doesn’t need to be mine:

I want to own and drive, manage, share my identity.
I want to do that on my own terms, using technology that enables me rather than provides for me.
I want to be my own ‘identity provider’ and I’d rather address challenges that this would pose than shoe-horn notions and practices of offline identity management onto the online networked world.

There you go, I said it. Here I try to work on it.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

crossposted from VRM Hub

Here is the page for the event itself.

See you there!

The topic will be further discussion of VRM – ideas, concepts, definitions, explanations etc, – a follow up on the game playing at the January session. Those who didn’t take part, do not fear, we have detailed notes on the results of January Game Playing.

Sign up here.

I thought it would be useful to spend some time exploring what VRM means to each of us. So I decided to dedicate the January VRM Hub meeting to discovering together the various aspects of what VRM means to people who rally behind it. It might help us explain it better to others, and collaborate more effectively together on how to make it happen.

We are going to take a playful approach to this and many thanks to
Johnnie Moore for agreeing to facilitate/run the game, and to GfK NOP for providing the venue. Johnnie works with all sorts of companies on collaboration and is going to use one of two of his favourite games to help us explore ideas together. He warns there’s a serious risk of having a few laughs and some danger of unexpected learning.

Sign up here, as usual.

Reminder: VRM Hub Christmas drinks will be on 15th December at Crosskeys pub in Chelsea.

Our speaker for this session will be, Nick Buckley, who kindly arranged the venue for VRM Hub until next February. He will talk about what the shift in balance of power between vendors and customers might mean for Market Research and where this might lead to real change rather than incrementally “adaptive adoption” of VRM. As always, I’ll encourage Nick to come at this from his personal perspective as a market research expert but also as someone who has observed the web and its impact on individuals.

I don’t have a link for Nick who is in the process of setting up a blog to continue to share his insight with the world. Good stuff.

Look forward to seeing you there, sign up here.

Also, we have a speaker for this meeting – read a person who kicks off the discussion – Peter Parkes, a veteran member of the VRM Hub community and a social web (power)user will be talking about ‘VRM and the battle for relevancy’. His site is Peter Parkes and he is part of the team at we are social.

I don’t think this is about whether VRM relevant or not – one of the things very clear to me from talking to people about VRM for the last two years is that it is very relevant. The issue is how, not why. So interested in Peter’s take on it.

If we end up talking about something else that’s fine too. But at least now we have a speaker, er, topic to kick around.

So please do join the discussion, which will start at 6pm, carry on until about 9pm. Then we might retirw to a nearby pub, which is what usually happens. Look forward to seeing you there. Sign up here.

cross-posted from VRM Hub

Doc Searls, the VRM godfather, will be at the Unlocking the see-saw conference, talking about VRM principles as part of the introductory hour before the user panel and the vendor panel discussions.

Mike Nutley, the editor-in-chief of the New Media Age magazine will be joining the ‘vendors’ panel, commenting on how VRM impacts branding & marketing.

And finally, thanks to the generous support of iCrossing we will be able to network drinks following the afternoon sessions as well as refreshment during one of the breaks. This makes a difference to me as VRM Hub normally operates on less than a shoe-string.

For those who missed it, here is the conference programme: Unlocking the see-saw and registration.

Look forward to seeing you there.

For those of Media Influencer readers who are interested in VRM and the Mine!, I will continue to write on these topics, in fact, I am stepping up the volume on VRM Hub and the Mine! project respectively. So please bookmark or subscribe to the VRM Hub feed and the Mine! project feed, if you wish to follow. I will cross-post for a while but eventually, the VRM action will happen there.