Yesterday morning a friend sent along a link to Seth Godin’s blog post Show me the (meta) data.
Seth says:
We need software on our phones that can remember where we go and what we do, software for our browsers that can create profiles that save us time and money, and most of all, software for our email that gets ever smarter about who we are and who we’re connecting to.
This was particularly timely as I was my way to Boston to present at the NSTIC (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) Privacy Workshop about the Personal Data Ecosystem and the emerging market-based solutions for privacy that we are starting to see emerging.
Here are some of the companies in the Startup Circle that are working on aspects of making Seth’s vision real:
Azigo has a browser plugin that allows individuals to collect their browser history, access their “interest profiles” from ad networks, and create their own interest profile that resides on the browser that they manage. The user can choose to share a profile with media sites they visit and support relevant ads being displayed. It also stops existing tracking and beacons.
egoArchive is based in Vienna and supports individuals collecting the contents of all the web pages they visit and social media streams.
The data locker and vault services that are under development such as Singly and Personal will enable individuals to collect this data. Personal is in private alpha and has a sophisticated user interface to help manage profile sharing.
Seth summarizes Richard Thaler’s article in the New York Times piece from April Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All.):
He argues that you (not some company) ought to own your caller history, your credit card history, etc. If it was available to you as a machine-readable file, you could easily submit it to another company and see if there was a better deal available. You could make your preferences and your history (you, basically) portable, and others could bid for a chance to do better for you.
We agree with Richard that individuals should have the right to copies of all the data generated from transactions and that individuals should be the ones to link together diverse data sources.