Think of the industrialized world as Kansas and the Internet as Oz. The difference is actually more radical than that, because the Internet is real. From the perspective of industry, the Internet is actually surreal. It’s a place that calls for depiction by Dalí, or Escher or Magritte. For example, the term “content” suggests a quantity of stuff we can “upload”, “download” and “distribute.” Yet, most of the time we are actually copying and proliferating. That’s because data moves by a process of replication. “The Internet is a copy machine”, Kevin Kelly says.
So, how do we “protect” something that is not a thing, has value, and is easily copied? Well, there are lots of ways, but maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is, Who do we share it with, and what decisions about it do we, as a couple, make about it?
Questions about protection usually devolve into arguments about ownership, and that’s a red herring. As Joe Andrieu explains in Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing, “sometimes the arguments behind these efforts are based on who owns—or who should own–the data. This is not just an intellectual debate or political rallying call, it often undermines our common efforts to build a better system.” Joe offers five propositions for consideration:
- Privacy as secrecy is dead
- Data sharing is data copying
- Transaction data has dual ownership
- Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated
- Taking back ownership is confrontational
Of #3, Joe says,
In the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in a confrontation with Mr. Hand, Spicoli argues “If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make it our time?” Just like the time shared between Spicoli and Mr. Hand, the information created by visiting a website is co-created and co-owned by both the visitor and the website. Every single interaction between two endpoints on the web generates at least two owners of the underlying data.
This is not a minor issue. The courts have already ruled that if an email is stored for any period of time on a server, the owner of that server has a right to read the email. So, when “my” email is out there at GMail or AOL or on our company’s servers, know that it is also, legally, factually, and functionally, already their data.
Because of all five points, Joe suggests,
Rather than building a regime based on data ownership, I believe we would be better served by building one based on authority, rights, and responsibilities. That is, based on Information Sharing.
Joe isn’t just talking here. He and others are working on exactly that regime:
At the Information Sharing Work Group at the Kantara Initiative, Iain Henderson and I are leading a conversation to create a framework for sharing information with service providers, online and off. We are coordinating with folks involved in privacy and dataportability and distinguish our effort by focusing on new information, information created for the purposes of sharing with others to enable a better service experience. Our goal is to create the technical and legal framework for Information Sharing that both protects the individual and enables new services built on previously unshared and unsharable information. In short, we are setting aside the questions of data ownership and focusing on the means for individuals to control that magical, digital pixie dust we sprinkle across every website we visit.
Because the fact is, we want to share information. We want Google to know what we are searching for. We want Orbitz to know where we want to fly. We want Cars.com to know the kind of car we are looking for.
We just don’t want that information to be abused. We don’t want to be spammed, telemarketed, and adverblasted to death. We don’t want companies stockpiling vast data warehouses of personal information outside of our control. We don’t want to be exploited by corporations leveraging asymmetric power to force us to divulge and relinquish control over our addresses, dates of birth, and the names of our friends and family.
What we want is to share our information, on our terms. We want to protect our interests and enable service providers to do truly amazing things for us and on our behalf. This is the promise of the digital age: fabulous new services, under the guidance and control of each of us, individually.
And that is precisely what Information Sharing work group at Kantara is enabling.
The work is a continuation of several years of collaboration with Doc Searls and others at ProjectVRM. We’re building on the principles and conversations of Vendor Relationship Management and User Driven Services to create an industry standard for a legal and technical solution to individually-driven Information Sharing.
Our work group, like all Kantara work groups, is open to all contributors–and non-contributing participants–at no cost. I invite everyone interested in helping create a user-driven world to join us.
It should be an exciting future.
It isn’t easy to “set aside questions of data ownership”, of course, because possession is 9/10ths of human perception. We are grabby animals. Our thumbs do not oppose for nothing. We even “grasp” ideas. This is why one of the first words a toddler utters is “mine!”
As it happens, this is also a key insight of The Mine! Project, whose About page says,
The Mine! project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them:
- take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge),
- arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to their needs and preferences and
- share it on their own terms
- whilst connected and networked on the web.
The Mine! aims to be an (infra)structure for other solutions – VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more.
These and other projects are visited by Neil Davey in a post in MyCustomer.com on VRM and the new tools of engagement. This follows up on an earlier post, based on the same interview with me. I wrote about it as well in How VRM helps CRM.
When we started ProjectVRM here at the Berkman Center, the idea was never that we’d do this development ourselves, but would instead provide a place where we could share our thoughts, show our work, do research, publish what we’ve learned, and encourage more development.
Nice to see the mojo working.
A Cloud of One’s Own is both the title and topic for my EOF column in the March issue of Linux Journal. In it I unpack a bit of what clouds are (they may have your data but are not yours), and the opportunities that might await if we turn around our orientation toward the rest of the world. A pull quote:
