Social Networking Silos

February 25th, 2012
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This article was originally posted at the I Shared What?!? blog on 29 November 2010.

Voluntary personal information sharing is most beautiful–and most powerful–when freely shared under circumstances chosen by the information holder. Today, however, we severely limit our power when we choose to share our information in closed sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. In those cases, we’re limited to sharing under rules set by those sites, and only to people who also agree to those closed practices.

Those sites are holding our information hostage, and the advertisers and marketing industry is paying wildly to keep this arrangement as a new status quo. This isn’t where we started though. Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that the web was built from “a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.” In a Scientific American article entitled Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee states,

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

While these sites offer a social networking benefit, they jail us with inconveniences and rules that disallow the sharing of our lives outside of their fortress. We at I Shared What?!? look forward to the days when we’re empowered to share according to our own rules, in our own ways.

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future, history

Trap My Contacts

February 25th, 2012
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This article was originally posted at the I Shared What?!? blog on 19 November 2010.

One of the beautiful things about voluntary, personal information sharing is that we have the option to interact with our friends and colleagues–as part of our social network–using a variety of tools and Internet services. It’s often a harsh reality check to be reminded that some of those tools and services don’t really want us to share in ways that we would like.

So it goes with sharing between service providers Google and Facebook. Each of them have useful collaborative, content sharing tools such as Facebook’s walls (telling in subtle ways) and photos, and Google’s docs, groups, and YouTube. Both providers also have ways to use your login as a single sign-on with other services (Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect).

What’s new: Google is reminding us that sharing your contacts with Facebook is a one-way street. It’s helpful to have a reminder that our sharing is not just about us, but often includes details and data about our friends that they may or may not wish to share about themselves. It’s a messy world while we figure this out.

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history, tools

The secret life of your personal data

January 13th, 2012
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Maria Popova at Brain Pickings wrote about this great 3 minute video by Michael Rigley, a graphic design student. Rigley says about his video:

Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.

In fact, the level of surveillance is profound, and the lack of transparency and personal control is not about inspiring “consumer” trust. Powerful entities have long deciding what information is appropriate for the masses. We may not notice that when we search for “java,” we tend to get more of what we were looking for last: the beverage, the programming language, or the island.

Coaching moment: Some people say “yeah, so what?” Some are concerned that this is a violation of our privacy, or our self-determination. Other people say it’s good that people are helping us sort through what we need, making the world more convenient for us. Are these assumptions fair? Appropriate? Safe? What do they prevent? Do you care? Why or why not?

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history, records

PII 2011: Owning Online Identity: Consumer-Managed Data

November 15th, 2011
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Fatemeh Khatibloo, Forrester Research moderates panel with Jason Cavnar, Singly, Todd Cullen, Acxiom, Shane Green, Personal, and Mary Hodder, Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium.

Fatemeh: why do consumers care? Jason: consumers have a sense of things being out of control. Todd: clients desperately looking for meaningful way to interact with consumers. On supply side, it’s new territory. Huge demand on marketer’s side. Shane: at core, we realize that who has access to our data shapes our experience, access, opportunities. Value: there’s a blindspot about what data is worth in additional value exchange. The more you start to see the opportunities as tangible, the more value is obtainable. Mary: This event is at a good time. As users get stalked online, they become aware that something’s happening, don’t know what to do, start calling senators. Opportunity for alternative to Do Not Track legislation, market solutions.

Fatemeh: privacy audits, do they provide a false sense of security when the government starts to audit the big companies? Shane: follow the money: big money in top right corner of Facebook (strong tie to advertising). People are waking up in unexpected ways to see connections between dollars and sense. Survey in their marketing: difference between “stuff in the attic that might be sold” vs “spy or thief in my attic.”  Jason: general awareness, at consumer level it’s my data, Sand Hill Road and companies that make money monetizing personal data. He’d like to see Silicon Valley invest in this respect as better model. Mary: zooming out a bit, how this works revolves around incentives (shipping parties, 3rd parties) and how they’re structured, and how does that structure support the business model? Going back down to audits: they’re meant to inspire fear as provocation to do the right thing. But how to incentivize the parties to do the right thing from consumer’s perspective?

Fatemeh to Todd: privacy and audits, marketing disconnect, who do we talk with in these organizations to make a difference? Todd: I wish it were one person such as a data steward, but that’s really rare. Our data is traveling around the web, should be easy to capture it for free. As long as this disconnect persists among marketers, no incentive to contribute to solving “a problem.”

Jason: Infrastructure needs to be put in place. Shane: lots of teaching, CEOs don’t understand how they got in the Wall Street Journal for spying on people. Mary: we talk to folks in advertising and trade agencies, Salesforce and CRM companies, media buying entities… right now they’re heavy users of personal data online. Folks are getting on board, need to know what business model is and how to fix this. Jason: there’s an enterprise need for interoperability too. Business model will be around easy access to customer control of data.

Fatemeh: industries that will help propel this forward, who has the most to lose and the most to gain? Jason: it’s the #2 in every market. Mary: banking and finance, there’s a lot to gain, high value in helping with most basic functions (e.g., reconciling statements with Mint), documenting meta-data around trades of data. Shane: agree that #2, 3, 4 players have a lot to gain. This is really tough for big incumbents because of embedded complex systems. Too much friction getting access to certain kinds of data that could reinvent/innovate travel processes, for example. Smaller innovators can tool up faster. Todd: high tech firms are not traditionally big buyers of data. Drive to grow globally: lack of reputable suppliers.

Questions.

 

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future, records, tools

PII 2011: Personal Identity Management

November 15th, 2011
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Forrester analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo asked if people had made available their report Making Leaders Successful Every Day. Report is available from Personal. She talks about car buying process as an example: start with personal RFP-type offer, receive offers that are customized to our concerns. Our interactions with dealers lead to purchase of a car. (Related: see ISWG’s Car Buying Engagement Model.)

Five key concepts that brands and companies need to do to engage:

  1. Respect my data, respect me
  2. Security of infrastructure, governance
  3. Transparency
  4. Data portability
  5. Economy, including penalties for bad behavior

Why is this coming? Consumers are fed up (breaches), but want relevance, convenience and value. Gigya study on single sign-on says many people use social sites for logins.

What should marketers & brands be thinking about: Rewrite your privacy policies to be understood. Create an organization-wide data governance policy. Install a data steward to liase between org and consumers (distinct from IT Privacy officer). Start working towards true data portability.

In future, Forrester is looking at redefining personal data, trust frameworks, how VCs look at this industry, etc.

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