Respecting people’s  data as currency and putting its management in the hands of consumers, is threatening tracking, behavioral targeting , marketing and advertising companies, who base their traditional food chains on tracking and purchasing users’ data for the online advertising industry.

Personal information enables pinpointing on personal context which in turn spells relevant, and translates to targeted offerings and ads. The interests of providers and consumers are not that contradictory. Whereas providers look at me, the consumer, and want ROI =return on their investment for targeting me with relevant offers, I am looking at ROA=return on attention, and may be open to what, in my context, interests me.

With the shifts in internet marketing, these  interests will have to evolve. We , consumers are changing and so should marketing discourse. We  are moving to pull based models , we own conversations and change loyalties by a simple click away.  Providers and advertisers are welcome to directly ask and get our cooperation and responses.

From an icentered point of view – reversing the paradigm is natural. My data, my context, are mine. I own it and I am the only one who can proactively manage my privacy and sharing. The economics of my context – contextonomics  is a currency, yet no one has the right, unsolicited,  to infiltrate my spheres, monitor my actions and patterns and hover around, manipulating my data.

A Wall street Journal article describes several start-up initiatives that start catering for user centered needs and empower active trading of personal data by users.

 There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, companies like Myid , Intelliprotect , Abine, that block online tracking, together with privacy groups and federated identity initiatives, represent the user side privacy protection and give privacy management services to prevent companies from viewing  results of tracking data, without direct consumer consent.

On the other side, companies like Personal Inc, i-allow  pay people a commission on their consent to share their data with marketers and advertisers.

These companies are pioneering initiatives that cater directly for user centered data on her behalf.  That in itself is a significant move towards a real user centered marketing paradigm.

Treating data as currency does not end in placing individuals as partners in food chains created around them. Contextualization mechanisms are not ripe yet to allow for context based transactions that exceed observation of raw data.

Once user side contextualization will mature, it can evolve to serve as alternative currency, in the struggle over a user’s’ attention.

 In a long tail data based economy, attention bartering  can be translated to different food chains on digital content consumption platforms. E.g, select personalized commercial targeting for the same content item by incorporating a variety of aggregation and distribution channels with different value adding chains and financial reconciliation mechanisms.  It empowers new mechanism of exchange, new kinds of aggregators. A converged unified TVIP based, social media 2.0 environment allows for diversified food chains around the same content items. To name a few:

• A pay-per-view viewership of a sports match with additional prior matches of the player who scored highest or the winning team for different bundling with targeted ads and related commercial offerings for different price options.
• A choice of a pay per view movie, leading to additional movie offerings with the same actors/director, combined with all sorts of monitory or context + ad or merchandising bundling.
• Aggregators and providers will have banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer.
• Users can allow companies use their profiles or data for market research, targeting and get rewarded directly as part of the food chain created around them by content offerings, digital coupons, merit points…..

The user centered approach, that puts individuals at the center with active control over their data and privacy and calls for a paradigm change in relations with providers, institutions and content creators, is beginning to mushroom through preliminary initiatives and writings.

The following is a partial list I have accumulated.

Initiatives around user centered proactive data management

• Project VRM – VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. It’s a reversed, pull based paradigm that presents the other side of CRM (customer relationship management) and provides customers with independence from closed siloed vendors’ golden cages.
• Personal.com – User side data sharing management initiative
• Personal data store  and Mydex personal data store – a personal data center about individuals for interactions with institutions through common data models to be shared and viewed permission based.
• The Mine! Project – The Mine! Project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them to take charge of their data, arrange it according to their needs and preferences and share it on their own terms.
• The internet identity workgroup  is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet
• The personal data ecosystem supports businesses supporting user’s need to control, manage, and direct the way they want to share and allows for the emergence of new data markets and services
• NET EUCEN – network of European Stakeholders for enhancing user centricity in eGovernance

These initiatives, together with groups that work on identity management, will create a nucleus for a blueprint of systems that will truly put individuals at the center and will facilitate user centered control over individual data, privacy, choices and sharing.

Books

Pull: The power of the semantic web to transform your business – David Siegel

The power of pull: How smart moves, smartly made, can set big things in motions – John Hagel III and John Sealy Brown

A video: The data locker vision – by David Siegel.

 A video describing a future scenario of a  fantastic  user centered, personalized, contextualized reality  of daily life with  a personal data locker vision by David Siegel. This is what an icentered ecosystem will look like, when all platforms, technologies, contextualization tools and practices will mature, interoperate and personally align  around each individual.

How can I track down old information about me that floats out there in the digital Ether? Whether I’m just  privacy sensitive and don’t want scraps of data around me dispersed all over without my knowing or control, wish to minimize places I registered to but did not deactivate, hate to think that companies out there manipulate my data, feel abused by the goldmine of my data that makes marketers and advertisers happy but leaves me out of the food chains, or wish to make old hunchbacks  that can be dug by search engines,  fade away – I can now have a personal privacy cleaner at my disposal.

A  US privacy company, Abine, launched DeleteMe - a “delete button for the Internet.”   It  tracks down, on users’ behalf,  traces of personal identity and information from data, passwords, profiles, and up to search results that make people unhappy, and erases them. Price is between 10$-100$, depending on  how much one wants to remove and from where.

I haven’t tried it, so I have no way of telling how thorough and efficient it is, and maybe in the distributed internet there can’t be a seal proof guarantee.

Regardless, the initiative deserves  praise for several grounds:

To start with – it’s a universal service that exceeds the boundaries of specific siloed sites. As such it takes a harmonized approach for my digital residues from a holistic point of view and caters for my privacy needs all across.

In the current state of web related privacy policies, where as a user I’m helpless in front of opaque data gathering in sites, can’t really keep track or notice data manipulation and have to deal with a plethora of privacy policies, it’s good to have a privacy policeman directly protecting my side, working on my behalf.

The business plan based on profit generated from direct provisioning for my privacy demands, is a trust enhancer because it assures no need or ulterior motives for my data manipulation as part of the company’s business plan . I pay – I’m the customer – they cater for my needs.

 Straight. Simple. Clean.

Also the cart of services they offer answers any need from any prism a user may wish for.

The company offers data removal methods activated through both automated tools and manual data manipulation in sites, that in itself promises a more thorough and systemic cleaning.

User side services such as DeleteMe that empower me, the individual, to take active control through outsourcing expert based is yet another step towards enhancing user centered paradigms and shift control over web interaction from providers to us users – an  important step towards a transparency culture and a cleaner web ecology.

 In an icentered digital world I want to experience the web from a holistic point of view that dynamically revolves around me.

In the current paradigm there are still barriers that prevent such an evolution.

1. Providers want to continue and cultivate a siloed digital landscape through proprietary applications that aim to keep me captive in their sites. It is in their interest to keep a strong hold on my accumulated data and not allow its portability. I have an elaborate profile at Amazon and greatly enjoy the refined Amazon recommendation engine. It is based on collaborative filtering that matches my affinities, as expressed in my past purchases and interests> Yet,  Amazon will make sure that, although my data are mine, I will not enjoy any of that, once I choose to shop at Barnes and Nobles.  My interest is to transcend the golden cage of user stickiness and expand to open ended contextification.
2. I still have disjoint profiles and identities. Current profile fragmentation is due to the fact that there is no global contextification architecture that can serve as a universal reference base.
3.  In various social networks and applications, different tools, choices and varied points of interest   create complex interactions. Infrastructures, applications and partial harmonization tools for user side interactions are emerging; interactions are becoming more complex and turned within the sites into interactive activity and conversation points. As a result, in many sites I can express my views and affinities through like, follow, comment, recommend and share with friends buttons, research on-site through comparative shopping links …. But all that does not yield an inclusive harmonious prism that I can capitalize on elsewhere.

3.      Blurring of boundaries – where the ecommerce world infiltrates  into our social platforms , our social spheres are used as social graphs for marketing purposes, and up to the unilateral attitude of transporting commercial arenas to new social platforms– as is the case with social marketing.  Even when social businesses attempt to take a human touch, as Brian Solis points, not all marketers are necessarily intent on a real dialog – where they listen and accommodate as part of a genuine customer service – to which social platforms naturally lend themselves, but rather see us as social consumers targetable in a one way marketing push channel.  

 Another  example of blurring of boundaries,  when  social spheres become social sales and marketing broadcast platforms, is Facebook marketing, where a social communication platform set for individuals becomes a home and sales arena for retail brands.  When Facebook expands  from its original  social communication and social identity hub and aspires to become my home page that’s one thing, but when it  also becomes a marketing and sales arena,  its original mission statement Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected no longer  reflects that user side affinity. As its business model  does not derive directly from its users, Facebook’s loyalty, doubtful to begin with, becomes all the more problematic, due to the nature of such a model. So, while  I want portability that will serve me wherever I go, Facebook wants to have it all through its portal. While  to me it does not have to spell that Facebook will turn into my department store, to Facebook, on the other hand, it is yet another building block on the way to attempting and “owning” me on the web.

In fact the movements made in this direction transfer the hegemony power struggles to yet another frontier –the anchor for web based interactions –  it generates a new war between the Facebooks and Googles around owning the biggest chunk of my digital sum total through their platforms. They woo me to  embrace them as my major interaction portal, by adding an integrated intuitive  communication platform  ( Facebook) or social ingredients to search (Google)  Their alterior motive is to facilitate collecting, storing and using my data, as profit making mechanisms.  None are trully committed to protect my privacy and would love to come with more creative ways to manipulate my data for their benefit.

So whoever wins – I still stand to lose.   

Such  solutions do not satisfy my holistic aspiration of an icentered web experience, because although the business models of these companies stem directly from me, they depend on 3^rd parties and therefore do not necessarily cater for my needs as a prime consideration. Hence I have every reason to apprehend that I may be manipulated as a tool in the profit making mechanisms -my privacy is breached, my data  may be shared without my knowledge and certainly without my consent.

As I aspire for a harmonious, inclusive and dynamic experience, I wish to have the following:

• I want that my future relations with providers be based on liberal and open ended attitudes that foster a free flow and relinquish control. A different culture does not spell loss – it challenges existing paradigms but cultivates free choices based on satisfying connectedness instead of provider based authority.
• Portability – I wish to be able to experience portability of my personal identity, profile and my social sphere between the various providers and social networks that I visit. Too few companies develop or offer open social plug -ins that empower that.
• I want sites to interconnect so my opted portability is made seamless and intuitive
• I want my experiences, choices and awarding options to my friends to share or give, at the tip of my finger, from wherever I am, with whoever I want and around relevant issues.
• I want to have the tools and means to do that and personally calibrate what suits me best.
• I want my data to reside at my side and manage my sharing with providers and friends
• I want companies to empower me, not dictate to me or exploit my data without considering me as direct partners in the food chains created around me.

Harmonization is on its way – but the buttered side of the bread is still reversed.

Only when the bread around my data will be buttered on my side and be shared by me with providers, marketers and advertisers in food chains that see me as a partner to the process – I will truly become the real customer for new platforms that are built for me – and not my data as their anchor point.

@facebook.com – Messages – my unified messaging portal- I can now talk to my friends via all real time communication means from email and up to  SMS, chat  or Messages- all through a single entry point at Facebook.

A single social integrated Inbox for all social communication is  truly a  wonderful offer.Streamlined social communications with my chosen circle of friends.  Simple, intuitive, fluid.

Spam and noise out. A white list of selected friends’  circle in.

All courtesy of Facebook.

How efficient.

How comforting.

How tempting.

How frightening!

No doubt a unified messaging system with all my friends is the future. User side harmonization is good – it’s efficient, inclusive, friendly, streaming. Takes a holistic view of me as a user and attempts to fully and intuitively accommodate me, simplify my interactions and allows me to see a comprehensive picture of my communications with a specific friend via all instant means.

What does it require of me? To reveal a lot more.

Once I register to this new system, I give Facebook my cellular number,  and access to my IM and external e-mail systems. Facebook already has a list of all my friends and can rate their value to me based on my interactions.

The good news – I don’t need to expose my shoes and bra size.

What a bear hug!

Can we afford it? Is it worth the price?

There ’s no free meal.

Beware.

Facebook wants to be there every moment of the day in all our interactions, documentation of activities, social sphere.

There’s only one question – is it really an honest to God user side service?

In a corporate driven hegemony race, can what to us users is blessed harmonization be reconciled with giants’ interests for increasing customer share and captivity through consolidation? Are we being played into the giant war between Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft…

A war over enlarging user based virtual territories.

This integrated offer will tempt me to migrate from several walled gardens  of email, IM providers  and spend more time and communications in another walled garden – Facebook.

Will we wake up one morning to find contextual text ads on the sides of our IM and chats based on what and with whom we communicated?

Can we innocently trust Zuckerberg’s soothing privacy keeping promises or, given FaceBook’s history, is it just a  lip service? Are the technologies to ensure that really there?

Where will it evolve?

How long before a cellular @facebook messaging application is up – and then we’ll be under Facebook’s hug through all media, systems and devices?

Shall we gradually stop using other mail systems, and slip into @facebooks’ comfort zone?

Will the other companies gracefully surrender or will they have to integrate Facebook’s messages to their mail systems?

And the biggest question of all – what about our privacy, ownership of our data, visibility to what we talk about and with whom?

If we feared Google’s search monitoring – that’s nothing compared to the exposure level of Facebook’s aggregated messaging platform.

Day in and day out we are prey to business social platforms. Will advertisers lurk around our walls on Facebook, hunting for indicative communications  from this single inbox?

Facebook is the natural communication platform of youngsters who intuitively share all with Facebook friends. Many of them are unaware of the distinctions, privacy implications and the data preying industry that just looks for easier ways to get it all.

Do we really want all our interactions harmonized under the auspices of a commercial entity whose business model depends on 3^rd party interests and is not directly tied to us?

In order to gain our trust Facebook will have to give us full control over our privacy settings and full visibility of their data collection, storage and usability.  

And still it is not enough.

A true user centered  web is where services are built around me, the individual, and for me, opening up the soiled gardens of providers that aim to keep me captive in a comforting bear hug.

The future lies in real user side services. A user centered approach that treats my data as my asset to keep.

When we pay a bank to keep and manage our money – its revenue streams, obligations and commitment are directly to us. Reulations to that end protect us.

Our personal data is a valuable currency and should be managed by user side data base banks that are directly just as committed to us and regulated in the same manner.

I was recently asked about the icentered view on trust, so I am summarizing the Icentered view on trust, privacy and new  web ecology.

Icentered means the individual user is at the center, with the wheel in her hands,  a personal vantage point on a web that is personalized, trusted, contextualized, private and safe –  a truly user centered web.

 It’s a reversal of trust empowering mechanisms – Instead of providers asking us to take a leap of faith in their protection of our privacy and data management, and claims of preserving an ethical code and transparency as trust building mechanisms, Icentered will look at trust from different aspects, as a new mindset, a new web paradigm.

The prevailing paradigm driving web interactions today is based on a silo approach where the context of sites, providers, and platforms… is the key. Users are required to adapt to the provided scheme. Site centered leaves users no options. They depend on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers, can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away. Most trust related discussions are centered on how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting information sharing and relevance enhancement.

 The basic questions at the heart of trusting site centered paradigms are:

•  Do I trust them? Am I relieved with privacy assurances provided by the sites with which I interact
• Do they abuse this trust?
• Do I have any means to check?
• Do I really know what knowledge they accumulate about me?
• Is the bargain of sharing information for receiving targeted offers or expose information for free services a bargain from hell?
• Am I in any real position to verify that the privacy policy stated is actually preserved?
• Do they save records?…Track movements?…Follow my activities?
• What security measures can I take?
• How paranoid should I be?

 Shouldn’t I at least be in a position to proactively manage my privacy and trust relationships? It is my data, my privacy!

 From an Icentered view, I am no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants. In all three spheres of interaction (people, content and services), there is one holistic harmonious “me” interacting with all of “them”. It is me driving all such interactions, in my context, from my point of view, under my control and my direct proactive management

The essence of the Icentered trust and privacy paradigm is that I, the user, am with the wheel in my hand and I master the process. My data will be kept at my end and not within the walled servers of the providers. I will expose/ share/hide as much as suits me personally. There is no need to pay 3rd party companies to monitor me, invade my social graph and provide tools to lure me.

 Contextualization infrastructure, cloud computing, user side filtering mechanisms, proactive privacy and trust management solutions that reside locally for each user, completely visible to her, and under her full control,  will empower a true Icentered web and create new trust based transparent food chains,  taking into account and rewarding all the willing participants in the food chains.

The reversed trust management has context  as the reference base of all explicit and implicit targeting efforts. To empower that a context based measuring scale is needed, that will become an open tool of the trade for enabling trusted context based offerings. Once our data are distributed, harmonized around contextual strings, trusted user centered services (contextual equivalent to Visa for money) can manage user context based transactions that reward all the participants in the food chains and still create a transparent, trustworthy web ecology.

In a ubiquitous world, who needs siloed fences?

Cloud computing begins to emerge as the infrastructure of choice not just for crunching very complex computation challenges, scaling up storage or managing distributed financial transactions. Commercial cloud services, social cloud based networks, open public clouds will evolve to serve in real time any business or data process, not just for big data centers, but as a direct  infrastructure for web applications aimed for the end user market. It is the best suited infrastructure on which the vision of a contextualized icentered web paradigm can materialize.

The real value of the cloud exceeds by far the financial benefits of not having to invest huge sums in IT infrastructure or scaling up. It lies in the array of on demand based applications that can revolutionize many businesses through Saas offerings. When computation and connectivity are pervasive, commoditized, perceived as a basic utility like electricity or water,  when terms like ubiquitous, always-on, real-time, dynamic, instantaneous, pervasive will be at the heart of all  information services, it would become natural to develop an open ended approach to data retrieval.

The fragmentation and distribution of information and interaction sources in siloed sites of distinct providers is counterproductive to our interests as users, namely facilitation through simple, intuitive, adaptive modes of interaction and the ability to reorganize data flows in personal or topical strings, according to individual needs or interests. Imagine being able to organize ad-hoc strings across sites or social networks, a social graph around an event, a prismatic view of a news item, comparative and informative shopping queries, personalized search related results, open ended work information queries  – all individually rearranged, according to the personal context, relevance, history or predictive forecasting for each of us.

The cloud as an on-demand service infrastructure is robust more than any siloed data center of an individual company. It empowers mashing up the infrastructure and the applications that run on it and the creation of data strings across distributed sites. It will allow the creation of new kinds of user bound services that will exceed siloed sites, and empower more sophisticated mobile applications.

 From an icentered point of view – where will my data reside? In the cloud, dispersed in all the sites I interact with and harmonized under the umbrella of my inclusive profile. The ubiquitous nature of the cloud will allow accessibility through all media and sites, agnostic to the origin of the data’s residence. When I can access everything from everywhere, storing materials, retrieving them, collaborating, sharing and creating food chains around them, will become a non-issue. Localization loses its meaning for both data retrieval and the whereabouts of the user or device storage and computation limitations.

 The big shift from push to pull mode, as analyzed  by David Siegel, automatically shifts the wheel from content providers  who put their offerings out there, to the users who actively pull, agnostic to where what they pull resides.  Once companies adjust their businesses to the pull mode, empower account and profile portability, harmonized contextualization can start to take place.

Once data referencing schemes and tagging systems enable to pull any data and contextualize that around a personalized scheme, there is very little difference between pull of services, content and products and pulling of personal data, creation of new food chains and building companies that pull, reorganize and capitalize on the pulled data on our behalf. Data stream services will extract relevance based context strings for a specific query/service/offering. Contextualization processes, delivered by business process software through a cloud based delivery mechanism need contextualization platforms and applications – but all these cannot develop without a ubiquitous, open ended, flowing infrastructure that empowers portability and accessibility through any smart device everywhere.

Once my data and interactions reside in the cloud, I, the user, become free to access my personal files, connectivity and content, consuming files from any point – fully materializing John Gage’s vision of “the network is the computer”. New kinds of providers will emerge, giants wars over hegemony of the clouds infrastructure and providers of new food chains and services. It will truly facilitate an Itom  based new long tail models based on data aggregated from different dispersed sources, and facilitate new personalized services.

It will empower an icentered culture, since the ubiquitous infrastructure available through clouds is bound to enhance new generations of web services, using pay-per-use models that will empower individuals to do things that previously only corporates could offer, due to high costs of storage, retrieval and data manipulation. More people will be equipped with more tools, a larger portion of our life will become digital, unique individual needs, personalized eco systems will ”float” in clouds.

At the same time, cloud computing brings with it privacy apprehensions that need to be addressed.  The fact that everything is always-on, available and accessible does not mean that it is automatically exposable as well. Pervasiveness and total publicy do not automatically go hand in hand. Total availability and manipulation of data from wherever, whenever and however still must leave me, the user, in control over what to expose to whom, when, in what context and in return for what.  The non tangible conceptualization of an ether like cloud out there does not provide the mental security of a sealed data center whose owners are accountable for retrieval breaches from their data storage facilities.  

Therefore cloud service providers should be accountable for their protection levels of data stored in their clouds in the same way that banks are accountable for the security and safety of assets put in their trust.

Google TV, the new Google, Sony and Intel initiative  has a potential to dramatically change the way we view TV today. Google has partnered with Sony and Intel to create a Google TV, made by Sony and powered by Intel chips that would enable a big-screen living-room web experience.

Such a set top box will become a central home portal for managing content and connectivity interactions for the whole household, through personalized handling mechanisms and will enhance new value chains, business models and consumption patterns. It will empower a TV anytime environment and will revolutionize the way TV content is consumed, to resemble web 2.0 seamless culture.

Today there are inherent gaps between passive TV viewership and interactive web navigation. Introducing Google search capabilities will make viewership intuitive when changing from a lean back TV mode into the lean forward web based interactivity.

TV viewership is passive by nature. You watch programs within channels, in a push mode, have no ability to interact with content, family or friends in real time around the viewed content items.

 More advanced set top boxes allow for limitedpull capabilities, services and VOD (view on demand) that are based on pull and active selection of what to view and when.

A web based, Google empowered TV will enable dimensions that do not exist today. It will turn the passive TV experience into a connected and shared experience and will bring connectivity to an audience that had no accessibility to the digital empowerment of the web. It will empower interactions with content in various interactive ways, web based services and new food chains around content consumption, targeted ads and up to commercialization of items and social media connectivity through the living room screen, by facilitating communicating with family members and friends in real time around a viewed program.

The digital divide is especially prominent in regard to TV, Internet and IPTV. Older generations, who are more technophobes, tend to choose the passive, coach potato like TV viewership. It’s a medium which is familiar to them, with which they feel safe. At the same time, many boomers are used to the basic Google interfaces, as search is one of the basic functions they know how to make on the web. Google should take an inclusive approach and introduce a simplified intuitive interactive TV interface that will bridge the digital divide  and provide a gateway to the connected interactive web world through simplified user friendly usability and interaction patterns.

TV viewers will change from passive spectators to active designers of their available or tailored options.  The borderline between traditional television and Internet will become obsolete, to be replaced by full media convergence. The origin of the content – TV or web based, will become immaterial; the only factor will be the relevance to viewers’ affinities and choices.

A new era of TV viewership that will integrate social media with traditional broadcast media, will empower a whole social interaction infrastructure around programs. From the simple connectivity with family and friends, sharing views and feelings  around a viewed program and up to creating ad hoc social communities of interest, encompassing the TV equivalent to location awareness – like who is watching this and that program now – from within my social sphere and up to real time communities created around a broadcasted program.

Challenges that lie ahead for achieving a flowing Google TV experience include issues such as:

• Privacy considerations
• Personalization – profiling users and monitoring their viewership to create a predictive user context and recommendation offerings
• Harmonizing offerings around users – from viewership, connectivity and up to commercialization
• DRM (digital rights management) issues – taking care of the rights of all participants in the new food chains created around pull based TV viewership 
• Audio-Visual content indexing to enhance  searchability
• Harmonized  tagging and referencing schemes  from various broadcasters
• Simple navigation and selection in the converged multimedia and TV content offerings enabled through a search engine
• Creation   of personalized accessibility in a TV Google web based portal that can be intuitively adapted to personal choices, habits and connectivity patterns.
• Harmonization of TV and web based business models and food chains to create new long tail TV based economic opportunities.
• New ad based personalization and targeting models
• Translating elements from the participatory web to be enhanced around  TV  programs, communities of interest and social web aspects.

 Personalizing TV viewership and translating it into a web like searchable experience is a very significant step in adapting   the web to larger audiences and turning the living room into a TV web based personal portal.  

Google is in a perfect position to lead the home TV revolution. Google has reorganized the distributed content on the web to make it searchable for its users, and capitalize on it as its ad based revenue making platform for the digital world.  Google sells its online advertising through a unique online model, where every Google search is analysed to determine which advertisers are best matched to get exposure through the “sponsored links” on every results page.

Imagine Google reorganizing the TV and web based multimedia distributed content to make it searchable, build new on demand, pull based food chains and activate its analysis tools to retarget the repository of TV ads, the engine at the heart of commercial TV economics. Such a disruptive TV ad based system will replace the traditional TV ad spot buying with fully automated digital marketplace systems, by best matching relevance to individual spectators, in a web like manner. The same data mining methods at the heart of content searchability, users’ data collection, ad placement and their respective matching mechanisms can create an increasing return cycle for all the food chains, business models and for all the participants in the new TV based environment, with Google’s engines at its heart.

 Let’s only hope that in the process Google will manifest the due respect, transparency and sensitivity to its users’ trust, privacy, choices and affinities.    

 Disclaimer:  I have a traditional commercial  TV background. Also, already in 2000 I was involved in the global TV anytime forum  and over the years I was involved in additional digital TV initiatives.

Reading Danah Boyd’s post Speaking about privacy and publicity , where she reminded corporates about the people behind the users, felt almost like reading The Emperor’s new clothes.  Only here the cloaks the naked emperors of the digital world lack are those of basic empathy, consideration  and  respect.   The humane aspects that Danah discusses seem so obvious, that they hardly need stating. Danah shakes the dust from the technical, analytical, functional approach at the heart of current attitudes of the Facebooks, Googles  of the digital world,  because it looks like, in the  Darwinistic struggle for hegemony over our  social  web,  the industry forgot the basics about social visibility– the vulnerabilities, private sensitivities, individual boundaries, of the clients that are there to serve, to start with.

There are so many talks going on about the era of publicy, the generational inclinations of millennials to lead a public life, functionality, technology aspects – that the people, flesh  blood and soul are almost left out. The web is our digital habitat.  The notion of a private home can be equaled on the web to a private self, the right to individually decide if and to what extent open or close the  personal information tap.

Industries that build their revenue streams on manipulating our data, targeting us for relevant ads, invade our social spheres and turn it into social media as part of a marketing mix, cannot be sensitive to the personal touch of the people they serve. The lines of individuals are thin, fragile and vulnerable. But who are we?  just users, the milked cows, and so can be manipulated for corporates’ profit generation  while they hide behind the small print of privacy settings that almost no one reads.

I was reminded of the poem “curriculum Vitae” by the polish poet Wislawa Szymborska –the 1996 Literature  Nobel prize winner, and the dichotomy between the tangible and intangible aspects of relating to people in a corporate setting.  

“What must you do?

You must submit an application
and enclose a Curriculum Vitae.

Regardless of how long your life is,
the Curriculum Vitae should be short.

 Be concise, select facts.
Change landscapes into addresses and
vague memories into fixed dates.

 Of all your loves, mention only the marital,
and of your children, only those who were born.

 It is more important who knows you
than whom you know.
Travels – only if abroad.
Affiliations – to what not why.
Awards – but not for what.

 Write as if you never talked with yourself,
as if you looked at yourself from afar.

 Omit dogs, cats and birds,
mementos, friends, dreams.

 State price rather than value,
title rather than content.
Shoe size, not where one is going;
the one you are supposed to be.
Enclose a photo with one ear showing.

What counts is its shape, not what it hears.
What does it hear?
The clatter of machinery that shreds paper.

In our case – it’s the clutter of $ machines, capitalizing on our data. Can you trust the cat with the cream?  Do we have to trust privacy management policies dictated by interested corporates?

The answer lies in a new privacy paradigm – an Iprivacy lens that stems from the following principles:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what offerings are integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.

• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

New technologies, together with the ubiquity of cloud computing, will empower new kinds of aggregators and providers that will work on our behalf and reverse the mindsets towards new paradigms and a cleaner web ecology.

Indeed it’s not binary – transparency, empathy, mutual respect and fair trade do not mean the end of capitalism.  The participatory web does not mean that all doors are wide open for unsolicited public sharing. We will still be happy to pay for services we get – paying methods are varied. Jeopardizing our privacy for a seemingly free meal can be a very high price to pay – the problem is that people realize it only after they have been wounded, this way or another.

 Putting us back in our rightful place can transform the business  of social media. Corporates will come to realize that they do not have to master the whole process. Food chains around our data can still be a revenue source for good services they provide, only withwilling participation of all parties involved and  fair reward to all participants. Working with us and not through us empowers a whole new business culture. Corporates can still thrive and prosper, but they have to maintain their relevance to the culture we, their users, cultivate. Once this shift of mind is established – we can harness them to take part in new paradigms  that empower our aware and willing participation in the processess and food chains created around us.

It’s a quantum leap – it’s up to us.

Charlene Li ‘s post Google Buzz and kids – parental control nightmare in which she describes the way  she found out how her 9 years old daughter was exposed by Google  Buzz through what for the little girl was an innocent post, is something all parents need to be aware of.  Many naively assume that their kids’ exposure through social platforms is a 21st century youngsters’ lifestyle in a totally connected digital universe.  Not all parents have the tools and skills to see what their kids do in social environments that are not kid friendly, or direct their kids to safe zones and instruct them against the pitfalls of social platforms and such faux pas like Buzz.

Same goes for older people who pride themselves on mastering email. Many have Gmail, which has almost become a commodity, are most likely unaware of  Buzz and its implications, or at best don’t touch a new button on their screen that they don’t know what to do with and are afraid to activate for fear it will cause something they will not know to undo. Older generations are much more privacy oriented in their web interactions than the net generations.  It is very important to bridge digital divide through a universal inclusive approach of facilitating, but automating features in the name of user friendliness can have a dark side to it.

It is our call to speak up in the name of all those who are not sophisticated, skilled or aware enough to understand the privacy and safety breaches done by corporates who do not practice enough social responsibility to make sure that potential users are fully aware of what they are entering into and are given an active choice. Fine print in a Terms of Service section that 90% of the population doesn’t read is good for liabilities and lawyers but not for our kids and grandparents. We cannot afford to wait for corporates to show the accountability that should go with their role as providers of mainstream platforms.

School systems should develop learning programs, instructional lessons and learning communities like ConnectYard that teach the skills necessary to raise our children into aware youngsters and adults. It is up to us and our educational systems to adapt learning to modern perils and safety needs.

But most of all – the quality, safety, privacy and accountability for our digital life is up to us – it should be in our hands. Up to us to stir awareness and call upon people to take an active part in setting the climate that will empower a paradigm shift towards users’ mastery of their digital life. Protecting us from the “Only Connect” moves of social platforms calls for a paradigm shift.

In a nutshell:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.
• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

Our social web is as only as strong as its weakest link.  We should strive for a web fabric that is safe, transparent, trustworthy and accommodating all users in all degrees of vulnerability. It is up to us to make it happen.