Developments

What’s a Good Customer?

For awhile the subhead for our site was,

How good customers work with good companies

It’s still a timely thing to say, since searches on Google for “good customer” are at an all-time high:

 

The year 2004 was when Google began keeping track of search trends. It was also the year “good customer” hit at an all-time high in percentage of appearances in books Google scanned*:

So, What exactly is a “good customer?”

The answer depends on the size of the business, and how well people or systems in the business know a customer. For a small business, a good customer is a person known by face and name to people who work there, and who has earned a welcome. For a big business, it’s a customer known to spend more than other customers.

In all the cases we’re talking about here, the perspective is the company’s, not the customer’s. If you do a Bing or a Google search for “good customer,” most of the results will be for good customer + service. If you put quotes around “good customer” on either search engine and also The Markup’s Simple Search (which brings to the top “traditional” results not influenced by those engines’ promotional imperatives), your top result will be Paul Jun’s How to be a good customer post on Help Scout. That one offers “tips on how to be a customer that companies love.” Likewise with Are You a Good Customer? Or Not.: Are you Tippin’ or Trippin’? by Janet Vaughan, one of the top results in a search for “good customer” at Amazon. That one is as much a complaint about bad customers as it is advice for customers who aspire to be good. Again, the perspective is a corporate one: either “be nice” or “here’s how to be nice.”

But what if customers can be good in ways that don’t involve paying a lot, showing up frequently and being nice?

For example, what if customers were good sources of intelligence about how companies and their products work—outside current systems meant to minimize exposure to customer input and to restrict that input to the smallest number of variables? (The worst of which is the typical survey that wants to know only how the customer was treated by the agent, rather than by the system behind the agent.)

Consider the fact that a customer’s experience with a product or service is far more rich, persistent and informative than the company’s experience selling those things, or learning about their use only through customer service calls (or even through pre-installed surveillance systems such as those which for years now have been coming in new cars).

The curb weight of customer intelligence (knowledge, knowhow, experience) with a company’s products and services far outweighs whatever the company can know or guess at. What if that intelligence were to be made available by the customer, independently, and in standard ways that worked at scale across many or all of the companies the customer deals with?

At ProjectVRM (of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, and out of which Customer Commons was spun), this has been a consideration from the start. Turning the customer journey into a virtuous cycle explores how much more the customer knows on the “own” side of what marketers call the “customer life journey”†:

Given who much more time a customer spends owning something than buying it, the right side of that graphic is actually huge.

I wrote that piece in July 2013, alongside another that asked, Which CRM companies are ready to dance with VRM? In the comments below, Ray Wang, the Founder, Chairman and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, provided a simple answer: “They aren’t ready. They live in a world of transactions.”

Yet signals between computing systems are also transactional. The surveillance system in your new car is already transacting intelligence about your driving with the company that made the car, plus its third parties (e.g. insurance companies). Now, what if you could, when you wish, share notes or questions about your experience as a driver? For example—

  • How there is a risk that something pointed and set in the trunk can easily puncture the rear bass speaker screwed into the trunk’s roof and is otherwise unprotected
  • How some of the dashboard readouts could be improved
  • How coins or pens dropped next to the console between the front seats risk disappearing to who-knows-where
  • How you really like the way your headlights angle to look toward bends in the road

We also visited what could be done in How a real customer relationship ought to work in 2014 and in Market intelligence that flows both ways in 2016. In that one we use the example of my experience with a pair of Lamo moccasins that gradually lost their soles, but not their souls (I still have and love them):

By giving these things a pico (a digital twin of itself, or what we might call internet-of-thing-ness without onboard smarts), it is not hard to conceive a conduit through which reports of experience might flow from customer to company, while words of advice, reassurance or whatever might flow back in the other direction:

That’s transactional, but it also makes for a far better relationship that what today’s CRM systems alone can imagine.

It also enlarges what “good customer” means. It’s just one way how, as it says at the top, good customers can work with good companies.

Something we’ve noticed in Pandemic Time is that both customers and companies are looking for better ways to get along, and throwing out old norms right and left. (Such as, on the corporate side, needing to work in an office when the work can also be done at home.)

We’ll be vetting some of those ways at VRM/CuCo Day, Monday 19 April. That’s the day before the Internet Identity Workshop, where many of us will be talking and working on bringing ideas like these to market. The first is free, and the second is cheap considering it’s three days long and the most leveraged conference of any kind I have ever known. See you there.


*Google continued scanning books after that time, but the methods differed, and some results are often odd. (For example, if your search goes to 2019, the last year they cover, the  results start dropping in 2009, hit zero in 2012 and stay at zero after that—which is clearly wrong as well as odd.)

†This graphic, and the whole concept, are inventions of Estaban Kolsky, one of the world’s great marketing minds. By the way, Estaban introduced the concept here in 2010, calling it “the experience continuum.” The graphic above comes from a since-vanished page at Oracle.

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Solving Subscriptions


Count the number of companies you pay regularly for anything. Add up what you pay for all of them. Then think about the time you spend trying and failing to “manage” any of it—especially when most or all of the management tools are separately held by every outfit’s subscription system, all for their convenience rather than yours. And worse: rigged with gimmicks (e.g. free trials) that depend on you forgetting what the subscription actually costs over time. And then think about how in most cases you also need to swim upstream against a tide of promotional BS and manipulation, much of which is rigged to fuzz you into weary agreement to a “deal” you wouldn’t want if you could get your head around the whole thing.

There is an industry on the corporate side of this, and won’t fix itself. That would be like asking AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy to fix the online service business in 1994. (For those not familiar with the reference, those companies were incompatible competing commercial forerunners of the Internet, which obsolesced all of them. The relevance here is that the Internet is the platform under all other platforms, and the only level playing field under every marketplace.)

There are plenty of services that claim to work on our side: Truebill, Trim, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me are a few. The big e-commerce platforms—Paypal, Amazon, Apple —all have tools at those links. Google does too, in a way, with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates. But of these are too narrow, too closed, too dependent on your personal financial data, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, too vested in the status quo, or some combination of any or all of those. None are as personal and independent as your spreadsheet, your word processor, your email client. There are basic and common designs to all of those, and standards as well, that make it possible for them to be personal, private, and substitutable

So instead we have a status quo that sucks (see here, or just look up subscription hell), and it’s way past time to unscrew it. But how?

The better question is where?

The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side. In fact, subscriptions are just one of many market problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side. The main reason they can’t be solved from the companies’ side because they’ll all do it differently. Also, most of them will want to hold you captive, just like Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy did with online services before the Internet solved the problem that was them.

Another is the monopoly bundling problem. We have that today with what we still call “TV” but is now a competing set of bundled subscriptions. The transition to the new status quo began when droves of people started “cutting the cord” to their monopoly cable or satellite utility’s bundle of channels and buying the same and better programming (and bundles) from “over the top” (OTT) subscription services provided over the Net rather than inside cable channels. Netflix was the biggest early OTT subscription provider, but now every source of flat-screen entertainment “content” (no longer just “programming”) is its own separate monopoly of captive content. Apple, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Paramount, Showtime, Netflix, Hulu, and NBC’s Peacock, are just the tip of the bundle berg. Blurring the lines between many of these are monopolies within monopolies, such as you get (perhaps with a bundle, perhaps not) with Disney’s ABC, ESPN, TNT and so on. (Its properties are legion.) Parts of those may or may not be available to you over the Net only if you already subscribe to a cable bundle. That’s what you get, for example with MSGGo, and NESN, which you access to some major New York and New England sports games and related entertainment—provided you can authenticate to their OTT streams over the Net by proving you still have a cable subscription that includes their channel or channels. While you can look across and manage access to some or all of them through Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire, you lack your own way to watch and pay for any of these on a direct and á la carte basis.

I’m not saying here that there is anything wrong with subscriptions. I am saying the online world would be a lot more free and productive economically if optionality was maximized with tools and services working on behalf of customers operating in markets where “free” doesn’t mean “your choice of captors.”

We should be able to buy content for sale on both á la carte and subscription bases using our own standards-based tools and third-party services that work for us at scale across all providers. For subscriptions that means being able to make, cancel and keep track of subscriptions in our own normalized ways. I have no doubt that this will produce a much larger overall economy while greatly reducing friction for everyone.

Now to how.

The short answer is with open standards, code, and protocols. The longer answer is to start with a punch list of requirements, based on what we, as customers, need most. So, we should—

  • Be able to see all our subscriptions, what they cost, and when they start and end
  • Be able to cancel or renew, manually or automatically, in the simplest possible ways
  • Get the best possible prices
  • Have clear and standardized ways of seeing á la carte options and in some cases offering our own ways (and prices) to pay for them
  • Be able to keep records of subscriptions and histories
  • Show our actual (rather than coerced) loyalty
  • Be able to provide constructive help, as loyal and experienced customers
  • Join in collectives—commons—of other customers to start normalizing the way subscriptions should be offered on the corporate side and managed on the personal side
  • Be able to hire substitutable intermediaries, or brokers (a service that TrueBill and Trim provide) without buying into their exclusive system

Meanwhile, it’s important to also consider where customers stand in the tug-of-war between subscription and á la carte options in both pricing and payment. Because á la carte is what customers would prefer in cases where use is occasional rather than constant.

Years ago at ProjectVRM we came up with an idea for this called EmanciPay. Dave Winer imagines that as a business he calls An EZ-Pass for news:

Not micropayments. Tolls instead of paywalls. 
If I don’t have an E-Z Pass, no access. If I do, it’s seamless.
Suppose one month I spend $84 to read stories on The Atlantic. They can make me an offer to subscribe. Look dude, you’re wasting money. Let us help you.
That’s a lot nicer than — hey asshole you can’t read this article unless you subscribe.

That third point is especially important: that you may make more money from simplified á la carte payments (based on actual use) than from subscriptions, especially if your goods are valuable but not of a kind that a customer would prefer to deal with as a subscription.

So there are really two goals here. One is to fix how subscriptions work for everybody. The other is to make it as easy as possible to pay for á la carte usage or consumption.


The modified image above is a Doctor Who TARDIS console, photographed by Chris Sampson, offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license, published here, and obtained via Wikimedia Commons, here. We thank Chris for making it available.

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Putting the R back in CRM

Bob Stutz at SAP

Every customer is familiar with Customer Relationship Management (aka CRM). They meet it when they get personal offers, when they call customer service, or any time they deal with companies that seem to know who they are.

Doing this is a  huge business, passing $40 billion worldwide in 2018, and expected to be twice that in 2015. All of CRM is also B2B: business to business. Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Adobe and IBM don’t sell their CRM services to you and me (that would be B2C—business to customer). They sell it to the companies that want to relate to you on other  than a cash-only basis.

CRM is also becoming more visible. The Salesforce Tower in San Francisco now dominates the city’s skyline, while the company itself was just added to the Dow Jones index, while other blue chip companies, such as Exxon, were dropped.

And the category is shaking up from the inside. Especially notable is Bob Stutzmove from Salesforce to SAP. He’s now Head of Customer Experience (aka CX) there.

It is in his new capacity that Bob argues, in an excellent interview, for restoring the full value of CRM’s middle name: Relationship.

The interview is significant, because Bob is, in many ways, the founder of the CRM software category, having started as product owner at Siebel then working at various times in similar roles at Oracle, SAP, HP, Microsoft, Salesforce.

He’s now back at SAP, and in reflective mood as to how CRM software has evolved, and what needs to be done next. It’s fair to say that he is not overly impressed with the current state; and seems to be in a mood to fix that. Given SAP’s German roots and that EU is getting behind more ‘human-centric’ approaches to personal data, it may well be that he is able to take CRM in a new and fruitful direction.

Here are a few thoughts that occur would be worth considering for moving CRM forward in a significant way. I am speaking here from the customer side, albeit from also having spent many years running customer management in large organisations (so have insight into what works/ does not work in and around CRM at present). Here goes:

1) We would clearly separate B2C CRM capabilities from B2B CRM capabilities; the latter needs a sales force/ team and lots of bells and whistles, while the former does not and needs a different set of bells and whistles. The current model applies B2B principles to B2C markets and that really just does not work.

2) To fix B2C CRM (our main interest in Customer Commons), we would remove the Sales/ Sales force Automation piece from the newly formed B2C CRM. Then we’d move the marketing part of CRM over to the side of the customer; we’d do so by re-inventing the concept of the preference centre: make that meaningful so a customer or potential customers can genuinely get what they want to get, and not get what they don’t want to get.

3) So in B2C, one is left with customer controlled data (including demand or buying intention data), permissions and preferences. Then the whole customer service piece would see co-managed data between individuals and their suppliers using common processes and tools. So both parties have tools to manage their products and services data. More on that below.

The over-riding raison d’être we’d place on forcing the above change through (if we were in a position to do so) would be that ‘CRM needs to re-think the R part’. That is to say, the bit that has gone so badly wrong is in how RELATIONSHIP is handled. It is definitely not the case that individuals do not wish to have relationships with SOME of their suppliers and have one anyway with SOME of their products and services; so let’s that a meaningful rather than the current abusive relationship.

That requires tools on the side of the customer. We call these Vendor Relationship Management (aka VRM) tools. (Explained here.) Many of these already exist (here’s a long list), with category names such as intentcasting and Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) — though all are still nee and do not yet popular at scale.

In this model, both parties come to the market’s table with relationship management tools: B2C becomes CRM+VRM. And both have reasons to co-manage the relevant data between them.

The screenshot below shows tools on the individual side for managing their ‘stuff’ (i.e. products and services); they do so in the same way for all products and services, and can make that data accessible to their suppliers who may wish to act on it, augment it, and ultimately co-manage it.

The same principles apply to individuals making their buying intention data available to the market in standard ways (example below). Both of the above, with appropriate, pro-active permission, can be used to drive digital advertising, marketing and customer service related communications.

So what the customer is asking for from the CRM service providers, is ways to plug in their own standardised, ultra-modern customer-side capabilities that enable both parties to engage in mutually beneficial activities. That model begins to feel more like a working relationship……

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Where there’s folk there’s fire

That headline was, far as I know, first uttered by Britt Blaser in a March 2007 blog post titled The people’s law trumps the power law. It was thirteen years ahead of its time.

Among many others, Britt was energized by  The Cluetrain Manifesto‘s 95 Theses, which David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I nailed to the Web in April 1999. Today the one-liner most often quoted from Cluetrain is its the first of those theses: Markets are conversations, which then became the title of a chapter in the book version of the Manifesto, which appeared in January 2000 and quickly became a business bestseller. Today the word “cluetrain,” which didn’t exist before 1999, is tweeted daily by people all over the world and appears (says Google) on more than 1.3 million Web pages.

In the 10th Anniversary (2010) edition of the book, I explained that markets were actually three things:

  • transactions,
  • conversations, and
  • relationships

I learned that separately from two teachers, weeks apart in 2000. Both were responding to Cluetrain‘s markets are conversations line, which became a runaway marketing meme shortly after the book came out. One of those teachers was Eric S. Raymond, a devout atheist and libertarian who almost single-handedly made open source a thing, starting two years earlier. The other was Sayo Ajiboye, a Nigerian pastor I met on a plane.

Both suggested markets are relationships as a corollary to markets are conversations and markets are transactions; but it was Sayo who gave me the assignment I’m still working on here with Customer Commons: to make markets are relationships far more real than what customer relationship management (CRM) and related corporate functions imagined it was, because they were all too busy thinking markets are transactions. Seeing markets as conversations would be a step forward, Sayo said, but not a big enough step. Relationship was key to fully realizing free, open and productive markets in the industrial world, and it could only be fully achieved by working on solutions from the customers’ side.

That’s why I started ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center in 2006, and why it’s still going strong today, both by itself and in the forms of Customer Commons (its one direct spin-off), the IEEE 7012 working group, and lately the Me2B Alliance as well. (The 2 in Me2B is about relationship, as I explain here.)

I’ve written about my encounter with Sayo in a number of places. But the most relevant to our work here is Mashing Up a Commons, published in the June 2006 issue of Linux Journal, three months before I became a fellow with the Berkman Center and started ProjectVRM. Without that encounter, there is a good chance neither would have happened.

Mashing up a commons is still our assignment. I believe it will be the most leveraged thing to happen to markets since the Internet showed up. I first explained why in Free Customers Make Free Markets, posted in November 2007. It closes with the headline above.

The time wasn’t right then, but it is now. Let’s do it.

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Privacy is personal. Let’s start there.

The GDPR won’t give us privacy. Nor will ePrivacy or any other regulation. We also won’t get it from the businesses those regulations are aimed at.

Because privacy is personal. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have invented clothing and shelter, or social norms for signaling to each what’s okay and what’s not okay.

On the Internet we have none of those. We’re still as naked as we were in Eden.

But let’s get some perspective here:  we invented clothing and shelter long before we invented history, and most of us didn’t get online until long after Internet service providers and graphical browsers showed up in 1994.

In these early years, it has been easier and more lucrative for business to exploit our exposed selves than it has been for technology makers to sew (and sell) us the virtual equivalents of animal skins and woven fabrics.

True, we do have the primitive shields called ad blockers and tracking protectors. And, when shields are all you’ve got, they can get mighty popular. That’s why 1.7 billion people on Earth were already blocking ads online by early 2017.† This made ad blocking the largest boycott in human history. (Note: some ad blockers also block tracking, but the most popular ad blocker is in the business of selling passage for tracking to companies whose advertising is found “acceptable” on grounds other than tracking.)

In case you think this happened just because most ads are “intrusive” or poorly targeted, consider the simple fact that ad blocking has been around since 2004, yet didn’t hockey-stick until the advertising business turned into direct response marketing, hellbent on collecting personal data and targeting ads at eyeballs.††

This happened in the late ’00s, with the rise of social media platforms and programmatic “adtech.” Euphemized by its perpetrators as  “interactive,” “interest-based,” “behavioral” and “personalized,” adtech was, simply-put, tracking-based advertising. Or, as I explain at the last link direct response marketing in the guise of advertising.

The first sign that people didn’t like tracking was Do Not Track, an idea hatched by  Chris Soghoian, Sid Stamm, and Dan Kaminsky, and named after the FTC’s popular Do Not Call Registry. Since browsers get copies of Web pages by requesting them (no, we don’t really “visit” those pages—and this distinction is critical), the idea behind Do Not Track was to make to put the request not to be tracked in the header of a browser. (The header is how a browser asks to see a Web page, and then guides the data exchanges that follow.)

Do Not Track was first implemented in 2009 by Sid Stamm, then a privacy engineer at Mozilla, as an option in the company’s Firefox browser. After that, the other major browser makers implemented Do Not Track in different ways at different times, culminating in Mozilla’s decision to block third party cookies in Firefox, starting in February 2013.

Before we get to what happened next, bear in mind that Do Not Track was never anything more than a polite request to have one’s privacy respected. It imposed no requirements on site owners. In other words, it was a social signal asking site owners and their third party partners to respect the simple fact that browsers are personal spaces, and that publishers and advertisers’ rights end at a browser’s front door.

The “interactive” ad industry and its dependents in publishing responded to that brave move by stomping on Mozilla like Gozilla on Bambi:

In this 2014 post  I reported on the specifics how that went down:

Google and Facebook both said in early 2013 that they would simply ignore Do Not Track requests, which killed it right there. But death for Do Not Track was not severe enough for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which waged asymmetric PR warfare on Mozilla (the only browser maker not run by an industrial giant with a stake in the advertising business), even running red-herring shit like this on its client publishers websites:

As if Mozilla was out to harm “your small business,” or that any small business actually gave a shit.

And it worked.

In early 2013, Mozilla caved to pressure from the IAB.

Two things followed.

First, soon as it was clear that Do Not Track was a fail, ad blocking took off. You can see that in this Google Trends graph†††, published in Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet (5 November 2015 in Harvard Business Review):

Next, ad searches for “how to block ads” rose right in step with searches for retargeting, which is the most obvious evidence that advertising is following you around:

You can see that correlation in this Google Trends graph in Don Marti’s Ad Blocking: Why Now, published by DCN (the online publishers’ trade association) on 9 July 2015:

Measures of how nearly all of us continue to hate tracking were posted by Dr. Johnny Ryan (@johnnyryan) in PageFair last September. In that post, he reports on a PageFair “survey of 300+ publishers, adtech, brands, and various others, on whether users will consent to tracking under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Regulation.” Bear in mind that the people surveyed were industry insiders: people you would expect to exaggerate on behalf of continued tracking.

Here’s one result:

Johnny adds, “Only a very small proportion (3%) believe that the average user will consent to ‘web-wide’ tracking for the purposes of advertising (tracking by any party, anywhere on the web).” And yet the same survey reports “almost a third believe that users will consent if forced to do so by tracking walls,” that deny access to a website unless a visitor agrees to be tracked.”

He goes on to add, “However, almost a third believe that users will consent if forced to do so by ‘tracking walls”, that deny access to a website unless a visitor agrees to be tracked. Tracking walls, however, are prohibited under Article 7 of the GDPR, the rules of which are already formalised and will apply in law from late May 2018.[3] “

Which means that the general plan by the “interactive” advertising business is to put up those walls anyway, on the assumption that people will think they won’t get to a site’s content without consenting to tracking. We can read that in the subtext of IAB Europe‘s Transparency and Consent Framework, a work-in-progress you can follow here on Github., and read unpacked in more detail at AdvertisingConsent.eu.

So, to sum all this up, so far online what we have for privacy are: 1) popular but woefully inadequate ad blocking and tracking protection add-ons in our browsers; 2) a massively interesting regulation called the GDPR…

… and 3) plans by privacy violators to obey the letter of that regulation while continuing to violate its spirit.

So how do we fix this on the personal side? Meaning, what might we have for clothing and shelter, now that regulators and failed regulatory captors are duking it out in media that continue to think all the solutions to our problems will come from technologies and social signals other than our own?

Glad you asked. The answers will come in our next three posts here. We expect those answers to arrive in the world and have real effects—for everyone except those hellbent on tracking us—before the 25 May GDPR deadline for compliance.


† From Beyond ad blocking—the biggest boycott in human history: “According to PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report, at least 615 million devices now block ads. That’s larger than the human population of North America. According to GlobalWebIndex, 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking adsby January of last year, and another 42% would like to. With more than 4.6 billion mobile phone usersin the world, that means 1.7 billion people are blocking ads already—a sum exceeding the population of the Western Hemisphere.”

†† It was plain old non-tracking-based advertising that not only only sponsored publishing and other ad-suported media, but burned into people’s heads nearly every brand you can name. After a $trillion or more has been spent chasing eyeballs, not one brand known to the world has been made by it. For lots more on all this, read everything you can by Bob Hoffman (@AdContrarian) and Don Marti (@dmarti).

††† Among the differences between the graph above and the current one—both generated by the same Google Trends search—are readings above zero in the latter for Do Not Track prior to 2007. While there are results in a search for “Do Not Track” in the 2004-2006 time frame, they don’t refer to the browser header approach later branded and popularized as Do Not Track.

Also, in case you’re reading this footnote, the family at the top is my father‘s. He’s the one on the left. The location was Niagara Falls and the year was 1916. Here’s the original. I flipped it horizontally so the caption would look best in the photo.

 

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How customers help companies comply with the GDPR

That’s what we’re starting this Thursday (26 April) at GDPR Hack Day at MIT.

The GDPR‘s “sunrise day” — when the EU can start laying fines on companies for violations of it — is May 25th. We want to be ready for that: with a cookie of our own baking that will get us past the “gauntlet walls” of consent requirements that are already appearing on the world’s commercial websites—especially the ad-supported ones.

The reason is this:

Which you can also see in a search for GDPR.

Most of the results in that search are about what companies can do (or actually what companies can do for companies, since most results are for companies doing SEO to sell their GDPR prep services).

We propose a simpler approach: do what the user wants. That’s why the EU created the GDPR in the first place. Only in our case, we can start solving in code what regulation alone can’t do:

  1. Un-complicate things (for example, relieving sites of the need to put up a wall of permissions, some of which are sure to obtain grudging “consent” to the same awful data harvesting practices that caused the GDPR in the firs place).
  2. Give people a good way to start signaling their intentions to websites—especially business-friendly ones
  3. Give advertisers a safe way to keep doing what they are doing, without unwelcome tracking
  4. Open countless new markets by giving individuals better ways of signaling what they want from business, starting with good manners (which went out the window when all the tracking and profiling started)

What we propose is a friendly way to turn off third party tracking at all the websites a browser encounters requests for permission to track, starting with a cookie that will tell the site, in effect, first party tracking for site purposes is okay, but third party tracking is not.

If all works according to plan, that cookie will persist from site to site, getting the browser past many gauntlet walls. It will also give all those sites and their techies a clear signal of intention from the user’s side. (All this is subject to revision and improvement as we hack this thing out.)

This photo of the whiteboard at our GDPR session at IIW on April 5th shows how wide ranging and open our thinking was at the time:

Photos from the session start here. Click on your keyboard’s right (>) arrow to move through them. Session notes are on the IIW wiki here.

Here is the whiteboard in outline form:

Possible Delivery Paths

Carrots

  • Verifiable credential to signal intent
  • Ads.txt replaced by a more secure system + faster page serving
  • For publishers:
    • Ad blocking decreases
    • Subscriptions increase
    • Sponsorship becomes more attractive
  • For advertisers
    • Branding—the real kind, where pubs are sponsored directly—can come back
    • Clearly stated permissions from “data subjects” for “data processors” and “data controllers” (those are GDPR labels)
    • Will permit direct ads (programmatic placement is okay; just not based on surveillance)
    • Puts direct intentcasting from data subject (users) on the table, replacing adtech’s spying and guesswork with actual customer-driven leads and perhaps eventually a shopping cart customers take from site to site
    • Liability reduction or elimination
    • Risk management
    • SSI (self-sovereign identity) / VC (verified credential) approach —> makes demonstration of compliance automateable (for publishers and ad creative)
    • Can produce a consent receipt that works for both sides
    • Complying with a visitor’s cookie is a lot easier than hiring expensive lawyers and consultants to write gauntlet walls that violate the spirit of the GDPR while obtaining grudging compliance from users with the letter of it

Sticks

  • The GDPR, with ePrivacy right behind it, and big fines that are sure to come down
  • A privacy manager or privacy dashboard on the user’s side, with real scale across multiple sites, is inevitable. This will help bring one into the world, and sites should be ready for it.
  • Since ample research (University of Pennsylvania, AnnenbergPageFair) has made clear that most users do not want to be tracked, browser makers will be siding eventually, inevitably, with those users by amplifying tracking protections. The work we’re doing here will help guide that work—for all browser makers and add-on developers

Participating organizations (some onboard, some partially through individuals)

Sources

Additions and corrections to all the above are welcome.

So is space somewhere in Cambridge or Boston to continue discussions and hackings on Friday, April 27th.

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The Only Way Customers Come First

— is by proffering terms of their own.

That’s what will happen when sites and services click “accept” to your terms, rather than the reverse.

The role you play here is what lawyers call the first party. Sites and services that agree to your terms are second parties.

As a first party, you get scale across all the sites and services that agree to your terms:

This the exact reverse of what we’ve had in mass markets ever since industry won the industrial revolution. But we can get that scale now, because we have the Internet, which was designed to support it. (Details here and here.)

And now is the time, for two reasons:

  1. We can make our leadership pay off for sites and services; and
  2. Agreeing with us can make sites and services compliant with tough new privacy laws.

Our first example is P2B1(beta), which might best be called #NoProfiling:

With #NoProfiling, we proffer a term that says—

This does a bunch of good things for advertising supported sites:

  1. It relieves them of the need to track us like animals everywhere we go, and harvest personal data we’d rather not give anybody without our permission.
  2. Because of #1, it gives them compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR), which allows fines of “up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4),” or “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).”
  3. It provides simple and straightforward “brand safety” directly from human beings, rather than relying on an industry granfalloon to do the same.
  4. It lets good publishers sell advertising to brands that want to sponsor journalism rather than chase eyeballs to the cheapest, shittiest sites.
  5. It provides a valuable economic signal from demand to supply in the open marketplace.

We’ll have other terms. As with #NoProfiling, those will also align incentives.

 

 

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Time for THEM to agree to OUR terms

Screen Shot 2016-03-25 at 12.12.45 PM

We can do for everybody what Creative Commons does for artists: give them terms they can offer—and be can read and agreed to by lawyers, ordinary folks, and their machines. And then we can watch “free market” come to mean what it says, and not just “your choice of captor.”

Try to guess how many times, in the course of your life in the digital world, have “agreed” to terms like these:

URsoScrewed

Hundreds? Thousands? (Feels like) millions?

Look at the number of login/password combinations remembered by your browser. That’ll be a fraction of the true total.

Now think about what might happen if we could turn these things around. How about if sites and services could agree to our terms and conditions, and our privacy policies?

We’d have real agreements, and real relationships, freely established, between parties of equal power who both have an interest in each other’s success.

We’d have genuine (or at least better) trust, and better signaling of intentions between both parties. We’d have better exchanges of information and better control over what gets done with that information. And the information would be better too, because we wouldn’t have to lie or hide to protect our identities or our data.

We’d finally have the only basis on which the Seven Laws of Identity, issued by Kim Cameron in 2005, would actually work. Check ’em out:

laws

Think about it. None of those work unless individuals are in charge of themselves and their relationships in the digital world. And they can’t as long as only one side is in charge. What we have instead are opposites: limited control and coerced consent, maximum disclosure for unconstrained use, unjustified parties, misdirected identity, silo’d operators and technologies, inhuman integration, and inconsistent experiences across contexts of all kinds. (I’ll add links for all of those later when I have time.)

Can we fix this problem, eleven years after Kim came down from the mountain (well, Canada) with those laws?

No, we can’t. Not without leverage.

The sad fact is that we’ve been at a disadvantage since geeks based the Web on an architecture called “client-server.” I’ve been told that term was chosen because “slave-master” didn’t sound so good. Personally, I prefer calf-cow:

calf-cow

As long as we’re the calves coming to the cows for the milk of “content” (plus unwanted cookies), we’re not equals.

But once we become independent, and can assert enough power to piss off the cows that most want to take advantage of us, the story changes.

Good news: we are independent now, and controlling our own lives online is pissing off the right cows.

We’re gaining that independence through ad and tracking blockers. There are also a lot of us now. And a lot more jumping on the bandwagon.

According to PageFair and Adobe, the number of people running ad blockers alone passed 200 million last May, with annual growth rates of 41% in the world, 48% in the U.S., and 82% in the U.K. alone.

Of course, the “interactive” ad industry (the one that likes to track you) considers this a problem only they can solve. And, naturally, the disconnect between their urge to track and spam us, and our decision to stop all of it, is being called a “war.”

But it doesn’t have to be.

Out in the offline world, we were never at war with advertising. Sure, there’s too much of it, and a lot of it we don’t like. But we also know we wouldn’t have sports broadcasts (or sports talk radio) without it. We know how much advertising contributes to the value of the magazines and newspapers we read. (Which is worth more: a thick or a thin Vogue, Sports Illustrated, Bride’s or New York Times?) And to some degree, we actually value what old-fashioned Mad Men type advertising brings to the market’s table.

On the other hand, we have always been at war with the interactive form of advertising we call junk mail. Look up unwanted+mail, click on “images,” and you’ll get something like this:

unwantedmail

What’s happened online is that the advertising business has turned into the “interactive”  junk message business. Only now you can’t tell the difference between an ad that’s there for everybody and one that’s aimed by crosshairs at your eyeballs.

The difference between real advertising and tracking-based junk messages is the same as that between wheat and chaff.

Today’s ad and tracking blockers are are primitive prophylactics: ways to protect our eyeballs from advertising and tracking. But how about if we turn these into instruments of agreement? We could agree to allow the kind of ads that pay the publisher and aren’t aimed at us by tracking.

Here at Customer Commons, we’ve been working on those kinds of terms for the last several years. Helping us have been law school students and teachers, geeks, and ordinary folks. Last we published a straw man version of those terms, they looked like this:

UserSubmittedTerms1stDraft

What those say (in the green circles) is “You (the second party) alone can use data you get from me, for as long as you want, just for your site or app, and will obey the Do Not Track request from my browser.”

This can be read easily by lawyers, ordinary folks, and machines on both sides, just the way the graphic at the top of this post, borrowed from Creative Commons (or model for this), describes.

We’re also not alone.

Joining us in this effort are the Identity Ecosystem Working Group, the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, the Consent and Information Sharing Working Group (which is working on a Consent Receipt to give agreements a way to be recorded by both parties), Mozilla and others on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.

Many people from those groups (including Kim Cameron himself) will be at IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, on the last week of next month, April 26-28. It’s an unconference. No panels, no keynotes, no plenaries. It’s all breakouts, on topics chosen by participants.

The day before, at the same location, will be VRM Day. The main topic there will be terms, and how we plan to get working versions of them in the next three days at IIW.

This is a huge opportunity. I am sure we have enough code, and enough done work on standards and the rest of it, to put up exactly the terms we can offer and publishers online can accept, and will start to end the war (that really isn’t) between publishers and their readers.

Once we have those terms in place, others can follow, opening up to much better signaling between supply and demand, because both sides are equals.

So this is an open invitation to everybody already working in this space, especially browser makers (and not just Mozilla) and the ad and tracking blockers. IIW is a perfect place to show what we’ve got, to work together, and to move things forward.

Let’s do it.

 

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Giving Customers Scale

scale-leverage

Customers need scale.

Scale is leverage. A way to get lift.

Big business gets scale by aggregating resources, production methods, delivery services — and, especially, customers: you, me and billions of others without whom business would not exist.

Big business is heavy by nature. That’s why we use mass as an adjective for much of what big business does: mass manufacturing, mass distribution, mass retailing, mass marketing, and mass approaches to everything, including legal agreements.

For personal perspective on this, consider how you can’t operate your mobile phone until you click “accept” to a 55-screen list of terms and conditions you’ll never read because there’s no point to it. Privacy policies are just as bad. Few offer binding commitments and nearly all are lengthy and complicated. According to a Carnegie-Mellon study, it would take 76 work days per year just to read all the privacy policies encountered by the average person. The Atlantic says this yields an “opportunity cost” of $781 billion per year, exceeding the GNP of Florida.

We accept this kind of thing because we don’t know any other way to get along with big business, and big business doesn’t know any other way to get along with us. And we’ve had this status quo ever since industry won the Industrial Revolution.

In 1943 — perhaps the apex of the Industrial Age — law professor Friedrich Kessler called these non-agreements “contracts of adhesion,” meaning the submissive party was required to adhere to the terms of the contract while the dominant party could change whatever they liked. On one side, glue. On the other, Velcro. Kessler said contracts of adhesion were pro forma because there was no way a big business could have different contracts with thousands or millions of customers. What we lost, Kessler said, was freedom of contract, because it didn’t scale.

So, for a century and a half, in economic sectors from retail to health care, we have had dominant companies controlling captive markets, often enabled by captured regulators as well. This way of economic life is so deeply embedded that most of us believe, in effect, that “free market” means “your choice of captor.” Stockholm syndrome has become the norm, not the exception.

Thus it is also no surprise that marketing, the part of business that’s supposed to “relate” to customers, calls us “targets” and “assets” they “acquire,” “control,” “manage,” “lock in” and “own” as if we are slaves or cattle. This is also why, even though big business can’t live without us, our personal influence on it is mostly limited to cash, coerced loyalty and pavlovian responses to coupons, discounts and other marketing stimuli.

Small businesses are in the same boat. As customers, we can can relate personally, face to face, with the local cleaner or baker or nail salon. Yet, like their customers, most small businesses are also at the mercy of giant banks, credit agencies, business management software suppliers and other big business services. Many more are also crushed by big companies that use big compute power and the Internet to eliminate intermediaries in the supply chain.

It gets worse. In Foreign Policy today, Parag Khanna reports on twenty-five companies that “are more powerful than many countries.” In addition to the usual suspects (Walmart, ExxonMobil, Apple, Nestlé, Maersk) he also lists newcomers such as Uber, which is not only obsoleting the taxi business, but also the government agencies that regulate it.

It also gets more creepy, since the big craze in big business for the last few years has been harvesting “behavioral” data. While they say they’re doing it to “deliver” us a “better experience” or whatever, their main purpose is to manipulate each of us for their own gain. Here’s how Shoshana Zuboffunpacks that in Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism:

Among the many interviews I’ve conducted over the past three years, the Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”…

We’ve entered virgin territory here. The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests.  This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination that have been centuries, even millennia, in the making. I am thinking of matters that include, but are not limited to, the sanctity of the individual and the ideals of social equality; the development of identity, autonomy, and moral reasoning; the integrity of contract, the freedom that accrues to the making and fulfilling of promises; norms and rules of collective agreement; the functions of market democracy; the political integrity of societies; and the future of democratic sovereignty.

And that might be the short list. And an early one too.

Think about what happens when the “Internet of Things” (aka IoT) comes to populate our private selves and spaces? The marketing fantasy for IoT is people’s things reporting everything they do, so they can be studied and manipulated like laboratory mice.

Our tacit agreement to be mice in the corporate mazes amounts to a new social contract in which nobody has much of a clue about what the consequences will be. One that’s easy to imagine is personalized pricing based on intimate knowledge gained from behavioral tracking through the connected things in our lives. In the new world where our things narc on us to black boxes we can’t see or understand, our bargaining power falls to zero. So does our rank in the economic caste system.

But hope is not lost.

With the Internet, scale for individuals is thinkable, because the Internet was also designed from the start to give every node on the network the ability to connect with every other node, and to reduce the functional distance between all of them as close to zero as possible. Same with cost. As I put it in The Giant Zero,

On the Net you can have a live voice conversation with anybody anywhere, at no cost or close enough. There is no “long distance.”

On the Net you can exchange email with anybody anywhere, instantly. No postage required.

On the Net anybody can broadcast to the whole world. You don’t need to be a “station” to do it. There is no “range” or “coverage.” You don’t need antennas, beyond the unseen circuits in wireless devices.

In a 2002 interview Peter Drucker said, “In the Industrial Age, only industry was in a position to raise capital, manufacture, ship and communicate at scale, across the world. Individuals did not have that power. Now, with the Internet, they do.”*

The potential for this is summarized by the “one clue” atop The Cluetrain Manifesto, published online in April 1999 and in book form in January 2000:

Cluetrain's "one clue"

What happens when our reach is outward from our own data, kept in our own spaces, which we alone control? For other examples of what could happen, consider the personal computer, the Internet and mobile computing and communications. In each case, individuals could do far more with those things than centralized corporate or government systems ever could. It also helps to remember that big business and big government at first fought—or just didn’t understand—how much individuals could do with computing, networking and mobile communications.

Free, independent and fully human beings should be also good for business, because they are boundless sources of intelligence, invention, genuine (rather than coerced or “managed”) loyalty and useful feedback—to an infinitely greater degree than they were before the Net came along.

In The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), I describe the end state that will emerge when customers get scale with business:

Rather than guessing what might get the attention of consumers—or what might “drive” them like cattle—vendors will respond to actual intentions of customers. Once customers’ expressions of intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase… This new economy will outperform the Attention Economy that has shaped marketing and sales since the dawn of advertising. Customer intentions, well-expressed and understood, will improve marketing and sales, because both will work with better information, and both will be spared the cost and effort wasted on guesses about what customers might want, and flooding media with messages that miss their marks.

The Intention Economy reported on development work fostered by ProjectVRM, which I launched at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2006. Since then the list of VRM developments has grown to many dozens, around the world.

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. It was conceived originally as the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Mangement, a $23 billion business (Gartner, 2014) that has from the start been carrying the full burden of relationship management on its own. (Here’s a nice piece about VRM, published today in CMO.)

There are concentrations of VRM development in Europe and Australia, where privacy laws are strong. This is not coincidental. Supportive policy helps. But it is essential for individuals to have means of their own for creating the online equivalent of clothing and shelter, which are the original privacy technologies in the physical world—and are still utterly lacking in the virtual one, mostly because it’s still early.

VRM development has been growing gradually and organically over the past nine years, but today are three things happening  that should accelerate development and adoption in the near term:

  1. The rise of ad, tracking and content blocking, which is now well past 200 million people. This gives individuals two new advantages: a) The ability to control what is allowed into their personal spaces within browsers and apps; and b) Potential leverage in the marketplace — the opportunity to deal as equals for the first time.
  2. Apple’s fight with the FBI, on behalf of its own customers. This too is unprecedented, and brings forward the first major corporate player to take the side of individuals in their fight for privacy and agency in the marketplace. Mozilla and the EFF are also standout players in the fight for personal freedom from surveillance, and for individual equality in dealings with business.
  3. A growing realization within CRM that VRM is a necessity for customers, and for many kinds of positive new growth opportunities. (See the Capgemini videos here.)

To take full advantage of these opportunities, VRM development is necessary but insufficient. To give customers scale, we also need an organization that does what VRM developers alone cannot: develop terms of engagement that customers can assert in their dealings with companies; certify compliance with VRM standards, hold events that customers lead and do not merely attend, prototype products (e.g. Omie) that have low commercial value but high market leverage, bring millions of members to the table when we need to bargain with giants in business — among other things that our members will decide.

That’s why we started Customer Commons, and why we need to ramp it up now. In the next post, we’ll explain how. In the meantime we welcome your thoughts.


* Drucker said roughly this in a 2001 interview published in Business 2.0 that is no longer on the Web. So I’m going from memory here.

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Privacy is an Inside Job

The Searls Wanigan, 1949

Ordinary people wearing and enjoying the world’s original privacy technology: clothing and shelter. (I’m the one on top. Still had hair then.)

Start here: clothing and shelter are privacy technologies. We use them to create secluded spaces for ourselves. Spaces we control.

Our ancestors have been wearing clothing for at least 170,000 years and building shelters for at least half a million years. So we’ve had some time to work out what privacy means. Yes, it differs among cultures and settings, but on the whole it is well understood and not very controversial.

On the Internet we’ve had about 21 years*. That’s not enough time to catch up with the physical world, but hey: it’s still early.

It helps to remember that nature in the physical world doesn’t come with privacy. We have to make our own. Same goes for the networked world. And, since most of us don’t yet have clothing and shelter in the networked world, we’re naked there.

So, since others exploit our exposure — and we don’t like it — privacy on the Internet is very controversial. Evidence: searching for “privacy” brings up 4,670,000,000 results. Most of the top results are for groups active in the privacy cause, and for well-linked writings on the topic. But most of the billions of results below that are privacy policies uttered in print by lawyers for companies and published because that’s pro forma.

Most of those companies reserve the right to change their policies whenever they wish, by the way, meaning they’re meaningless.

For real privacy, we can’t depend on anybody else’s policies, public or private. We can’t wait for Privacy as a Service. We can’t wait for our abusers to get the clues and start respecting personal spaces we’ve hardly begun to mark out (even though they ought to be obvious). And we can’t wait for the world’s regulators to start smacking our abusers around (which, while satisfying, won’t solve the problem).

We need to work with the knitters and builders already on the case in the networked world, and recruit more to help out. Their job is to make privacy policies technologies we wear, we inhabit, we choose, and we use to signal what’s okay and not okay to others.

The EFF has been all over this for years. So have many developers on the VRM list. (Those are ones I pay the most attention to. Weigh in with others and I’ll add them here.)

The most widely used personal privacy technology today is ad and tracking blockingMore than 200 million of us now employ those on our browsers. The tools are many and different, but basically they all block ads and/or tracking at our digital doorstep. In sum this amounts to the largest boycott in human history.

But there’s still no house behind the doorstep, and we’re still standing there naked, even if we’ve kept others from planting tracking beacons on us.

One of the forms privacy takes in the physical world is the mutual understanding we call manners, which are agreements about how to respect each others’ intentions.

Here at Customer Commons, we’ve been working on terms we can assert, to signal those intentions. Here’s a working draft of what they look like now:

UserSubmittedTerms1stDraft

That’s at the Consent and Information Working Group. Another allied effort is Consent Receipt.

If you’re working on privacy in any way — whether you’re a geek hacking code, a policy maker, an academic, a marketer trying to do the right thing, or a journalist working the privacy beat — remember this: Privacy is personal first. Before anything elseIf you’re not working on getting people clothing and shelter of their own, you’re not helping where it’s needed.

It’s time to civilize the Net. And that’s an inside job.

__________________

*If we start from the dawn of ISPs, graphical browsers, email and the first commercial activity, which began after the NSFnet went down on 30 April 1995.

 

 

 

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