Trust the Icentered way
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.
