On privacy, data ownership and self sovereign identity and the race to get there first.

People in the business know that companies 2.0 compete for our attention; a fierce competition with smaller and smaller margins (of attention). The end game is clearly advertisement. The pattern, simplistically, is:

1. user uses the service for free (or for very little money), 
2. company stores the data and profiles the user, aggregates profiles, does fancy Machine Learning magic, etc
3. company uses the data and derived information for targeted advertisement or (shock!) sells it to third parties for other lucrative endeavours.

Simple and effective.

Finally, people is getting more and more aware of what's going on (don't you, sometimes weirdly, feel like you're followed or even been scammed?); law makers are catching up to get a fair share of the revenue and economists are adjusting their theories to explain recent blips in their Capitalism models.

A trend is emerging where anonymity and privacy are becoming more and more important for users; and companies do make an effort to protect such users (from themselves?).
To the extent that some of them have announced changes to their business models. Facebook is paving the way.

This is definitely a step in the right direction but it's clearly not enough. Data is still stored in these companies' data stores and, moreover,  still - somewhat - traceable to a person.
Yet, we're seeing more and more efforts to frame the problem of data ownership in a lots of ways, some more creative than others.

Technology is also catching up (one of the many systems trying to tackle the issue is OpenPDS). And in the space of digital identity, self sovereign identity - users owning their digital identity much like they own their passport or identity card - is also being developed as a concept with associated technologies.

The problem, right now, is that companies haven't caught up as they haven't yet figured out how this switch will eventually affect their bottom line (read: make shareholders richer).
Implications, then, are that

• tools and processes for the end users aren't yet developed for mass market adoption: think, for a moment, about how easy(!) is to use a crypto wallet.
• incentives to move to this new model are virtually non existent so we can't really talk just yet of a new 3.0 model... maybe we can settle with a 2.5 though.

But - in a way - it's easy to see how this will eventually work. Companies will compete for that data: as if you were strewed with gold dust they'll knock at your (digital) door to come and swipe some of it. "Please, give us access to your browsing history for last month of May for the opportunity to win a trip to the Maldives!"; or: "Give us your Facebook timeline for last year to get a 10% grocery store discount for a whole month". And - make no mistake - we'll give it away (agent Smith echoes in my mind).

There will also be less mundane opportunities, obviously, which will generate new revenue streams ad new creative opportunities. A simple example comes to mind: "Hello A.C.M.E, here is access to my smart home data, please monitor it for intrusion detection and to activate my irrigation system when needed, whilst I am away. Oh, also please feed the dog, will you?!").

As long as this is done with fair, open and clear rules that guarantee the weakest users (like children and people with mental health issues, or the poorest) it's all welcome. 

In fact, forward looking enterprises should be pivoting right now and contribute to pave this new way in their respective market segment. Clearly, it's challenging: not only they need to embrace the risk of adopting cutting edge technologies, but also create new processes and redefine their identity if necessary. 

But the sooner they start the less the risk is to be caught by surprise. And maybe some of them will hit the jackpot and make it into the list.

   

Who owns user data?

I have been involved several times on discussions around user data ownership. With the advent of cloud computing, though, some of the topics identified may take another shape and service/application providers may have a chance to fully leverage the capabilities exposed by cloud computing.

A bit of context first. If I subscribe to a service on the web, whatever it's nature is (Facebook, Twitter, you name it!), I generate data about me that the service stores, on my behalf, in it's premises. Examples are username, contact details, preferences, tags, ...
If for whatever reason I want to access such data, I typically can only do it via the user interface that the service provides. In any case I never - it seems to me - have access to the raw data; let alone being able to use some other access interface.

But think if such data is stored on the Cloud on an Amazon S3 bucket (or equivalent), which offers an easy to access interface over HTTP, user ownership, Access Control Policies and the possibility of managing such data via the plethora of applications part of the Amazon ecosystem. In such case I - the user - have access to the "master copy" of my data and I can do whatever I want with it (such as delete it, modify it, make it more or less public).

Clearly there are drawbacks:

1. it requires the service provider to implement and manage the mapping of it's internal user representation with that of Amazon (or whatever other cloud storage provider)


2. the a service provider looses the ability to control the stuctural consistency of the data. And this can cause the application to malfunction.


3. the service provider looses the possibility to hide such data from other service providers/application and consequently looses the power to forcibly keep the user using its servie (well, at least it doesn't facilitate it)

Point 1 is in reality a "non" issue from an implementation perspective. And it will be easily solved via agreements between the two interested parties. Agreements, moreover, are facilitated by the adoption of standard formats as and when appropriate.

Point 2 is the most interesting as it involves a different thinking on architecting applications (I refer here to the seven points illustrated here by Simone Brunozzi, that I discussed here): architect for failure (in this case data structures), loose couple application logic and data and so on.

Point 3 is probably the hardest to implement, not certainly because of technical issues. But this seems to me a false problem anyway as if the service offered degrades users will go away no matter what.

I want to see people making use of what the cloud brings to the table on top "glorified web hosting" or grid computing. So maybe this is a valid "use case" that will stimulate developers and architects to think more out of the box.

The (hyper)reality of social networking

I was reading about hyperreality when I started thinking of how it relates to the social networking phenomenon and communities built around it. Is there a connection between the two? Maybe. In fact someone else has already discussed this topic in this rather interesting post.

My favourite definition of hyperreality is Umberto Eco's one: "the authentic fake". As you would expect the web is full of information about hyperreality, for example this is fairly complete article with examples.

I'll try to write down my thoughts on how social networking community members do live in a hyperreal world. I should warn you though: I may sound cynical and destructive. Far from me: I think there's a place for social networking web sites and services (after all I am blogger too) and there's nothing wrong with being a consumer of these services. As far as I am concerned now I am just trying to understand the mechanics, why they work and why they exist the way they are now, and how they will transform in the future to come. So bear with me on this aspect.

At the core of the meaning of hyperreality is the ambiguity between "real" and "fake" reality that arises when facts and events or objects are filtered by a multitude of media.

Members of communities built around any of the latest and cutest Web2.0 website interact by the means and rules offered by the portal they use (Facebook, MySpace and the like). This medium filters the behaviour adopted by people. Actually, members of any community, in a way, always interact within an accepted framework: think of the rules, implicit (values, culture) or explicit (laws), that manage our relationship in a social environment and how they drive our behaviour.
The main difference, though, is that people meeting face to face have other means (environment, body language, time...) that contribute to maximise the possibility that facts and events are perceived and understood correctly and close to the reality.

Now back to the social networking. As said the web shapes the behaviour; there's also in the mix the fact that content and messages are exchanged using a different time pattern compared to normal face to face relationships. A message, a profile, a blog post, a twit is sent to the server and then delivered to the intender recipient(s). The recipient(s) reads it, digests it, formulates a response and eventually sends it back. This, to me, contributes to the creation of a world and of a reality that is transformed: what the recipient perceives is the autentically "fake" reality that the sender wants to transmit having lost its immediacy and being tailored to the media chosen to operate upon. Besides the fact that sender and recipient know that the content being generated is public.
I like to think that communities in Facebook (I am not picking on Facebook, it's just an example) are equivalent to the community of house mates in the BigBrother house (or, for argument's sake, to any other reality). The media, the place and being observed changes the behaviour allowing the community (participants and viewers) to create a fake real world.

So, it seems that social networking is son of its time: it has been made possible by new technologies - higher network speed, new web site capabilities, etc - and it's expression of our current time where appearance rules.

I have a memory from my infancy: if you're Italian or you watch Italian TV you know about the Mulino Bianco commercial (this is one of the many) which epitomises the (hyper)real world. We (the community of consumers) are let to believe that that is a beautiful real place with a real family where - obviously - plumcakes and brioches are soft and tasty.

Is there any difference between the Mulino Bianco ad and any of the profiles in Facebook? Let alone the style and the manufacture - Facebook users may not be professional advertisers - the communality is that both are hyperworld where the authors want the recipients to walk in and live the life they want them to live.

In this context let me fool around. If hyperreality is made of hyperreal facts and hyperreal events that exist in a hyperreal world, then Twitter allows users to exchange hyperreal facts; MySpace and Facebook as hyperreal multi-worlds; SecondLife as real hyperreal world.

The astute reader may now say that hyperreality is just a play on words, people make real money with this sites, businesses and enterprises back them up. It depends, it's a matter of prospective. Vegas and its casinos is extreme hyperreality made true. Punters entering a casino get in a manufactured hyperreal place where everything is obviously fake to let you believe that our money is fake too. Incidentally, those who think that your money isn't fake are casino owners who live in the real reality of gambling business.

So, who's making real money in this hyperreal world? I guess those who are able to spoil the user data by aggregating it and extract useful market information, for example. I suspect that biases will eliminate each other when aggregated, providing the clever data manager with information to use at his like (hopefully within the boundaries of the data protection acts).

A real example is available here: it describes how Amazon makes money using information extracted by user generated data.

Yes, clearly this is a win-win situation. Community members get value by being able to cultivate their social aspirations, voyeurism, need to be heard, trend and fashion, benefiting of other members' experience. Providers - on the other side - are able to target established communities by processing generating data, aggregating it with the purpose of extracting financially useful information (read the Facebook case study).

I am sure there's more to say. I stop now but I am interested to hear from you, dear reader, your view on this.