He continues, “People are upset about privacy, but in one sense they are insufficiently upset because they don’t really understand what’s at risk. They are looking only at the short term.” And to him, there is only one viable answer to these potential risks: “You’re going to control your own data.” He sees the future as one where individuals make active sharing decisions, knowing precisely when, how, and by whom their data will be used. “That’s the most important thing, control of the data,” he reflects. “It has to be done correctly. Otherwise you end up with something like the Stasi.”
Sounds a little bit like VRM and a little bit like Jon Udell‘s Thali project. Wearables don’t fix the problem of metadata being collected about you, no. You still don’t control those ingoing/outgoing feeds of information.
Sandy Pentland points out a lot can be derived and discerned simply from the people you know. Every contact in your friend list adds one more bit of intelligence about you without anyone ever talking to your directly. This kind of analysis is only possible now due to the End User License Agreements posted by each of the collecting entities (so-called social networking websites).
An alternative to this wildcat, frontier mentality by data collectors is Vendor Relationship Management (as proposed in the Cluetrain Manifesto) Doc Searls wants people to be able to share the absolute minimum necessary in order to get what they want or need from vendors on the Internet, especially the data collecting types. And then from that point if an individual wants to share more, they should get rewarded with a higher level of something in return from the people they share with (prime example are vendors, the ‘V’ in VRM).
Thali in another way allows you to share data as well. But instead of letting someone into your data mesh in an all or nothing way, it lets strongly identified individuals have linkages into our out of your own data streams whatever form those data streams may take. I think Sandy Pentland, Doc Searls and Jon Udell would all agree there needs to be some amount of ownership and control ceded back to the individual going forward. Too many of the vendors own the data and the metadata right now, and will do what they like with it including responding to National Security Letters. So instead of being a commercial venture, they are swiftly evolving into branches or defacto subsidiary of the National Security Agency. If we can place controls on the data, we’ll maybe get closer to the ideal of social networking and controlled data sharing.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 