This was a comment on Identity Woman’s blog – I’m reposting here.
A snippet of IW’s post:
“Mary Hodder is one of the 8 experts Fast Company tapped to predict evolutionary trends for web 2.o in 2009:
Mary Hodder, Founder of Dabble.com and VP of Product Development, Apisphere
‘The future of social media is user’s owning their data, deciding who to send it to. Look for more companies that currently host the user’s identity to have less control over that, as things like Open ID take over and more companies try to compete by giving users more control over themselves. Look for ways users can own their own data, and companies that might offer that, sort of like a personal information bank’.”
—–
Sounds dead on to me.
I agree that one company or a small set of companies having preferred access/control over user data is not ideal. Sadly, I’m not sure that concentrated control won’t become the norm. Our economic and political systems have strong tendencies to concentrate power – it’s a recurring collective action problem where a small number of players (facebook, google, msft, etc…) have access to lower cost “cooperation” (collusion) than 6 billion citizens of the world – despite the fact that net social benefit would be maximized by a non-collusive approach.
Despite this historical tendency I hope that the power of the net to decentralize / distribute decision making power will lead to more user control over their own data. It’s an ongoing battle and the open stack, data portability, etc.. are all fighting the good fight here.
One other thought tied to biz models – I have a sense that the most fruitful pathway to user controlled data is focusing on $$$. Recast privacy concerns as monetary ones, where data=gold and control over your data translates into income.
Advertising offers a quick and easy entry point. Imagine a scenario where only the user controls access to their entire pool of data. Individual sites may have access to some subset of the data pool but ad delivery/targeting efficiency presumably correlates positively to the size of the data pool. Advertisers would then have a preference for targeting ads based on the complete data pool, which only the user has access too and which the user could $ell to the highest bidder.
There are some technical hurdles to providing translucent data (vs. full transparency) but we went to the moon & decoded the human genome so I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to build secure, flexible, translucent identity/data systems in the near future.
Anyway, those are my morning thoughts on Identity & Data. Thanks for the great work in this space.
Best,
Chris Camp
CC,
Interesting post. Feels a bit academic to me but interesting post nonethless. Data portability and the potential value of contextual content are the drivers as you note here. While the orwellian concept that major corporations are controlling our data and doing inappropriate things with it is terrifying its far from the reality today. Should we be vigilant in watching out for it? You bet. Should we be paraoid that it's happening? No. Technological change *always* proceeds cultural change. We are adapting our cultural approaches to new applications of technology and the value and security of data is being sorted along the way.
Web 2 apps like social nets and micro messaging platforms as well as web sites themselves are creating a natural exchange on the value of personal data. Really for the first time. The platforms don't set this value the users do. If I provide a bit more data and information in the social nets I participate in I get a bit more value. There is also a law of diminishing return that each user needs to find.
T