Tools

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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Terms: What are They and Why Should You Care?

User Terms Draft 2 Icons

User Terms Draft 2 Icons

Terms are choices you make to ask that your data and activities be treated a certain way. Customer Commons is developing terms with Kantara and the Consent and Information Sharing Working Group so that we have a standardized set of terms, which can commonly be used through browsers, apps and other forms.

It is our intention that Terms will come in Human, Legal and Engineering forms so that people can read them, they can be legally binding, and apis and code will convey and negotiate your chosen terms. The idea isn’t that you would constantly be choosing these things, but rather have your agent take your choices and negotiate for you. We also envision being able to copy someone else’s terms you trust, if you don’t understand what these choices will mean for you.

Terms may also be created that fit with various contexts, like how to handle your health data, or what to do about data you share for a purchase, verses data you share for social activity. Those will come later after the initial set is developed. What you see in the picture above are draft icons. We intend to develop prettier versions with a designer, and work with engineers to develop sample or open source code for both choosing terms, as well as responding to those term requests from individuals.

If you are interested in helping with this project, you can join CISWG UX Kantara, by getting on the mail list, signing the IP agreement (so that all contributions can be used in the project) and getting on our calls.  We hope to see you there. Or comment here with questions!

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New Rules for Privacy Regulations

The Wall Street Journal has an informative conversation with Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation. What underlies a change toward new models are two points: the servers holding vast user databases are increasingly (and very cheaply) breached, and the value of the information in those databases is being transferred to something more aligned to VRM: use of the data, on a need to know basis. Lessig notes:

The average cost per user of a data breach is now $240 … think of businesses looking at that cost and saying “What if I can find a way to not hold that data, but the value of that data?” When we do that, our concept of privacy will be different. Our concept so far is that we should give people control over copies of data. In the future, we will not worry about copies of data, but using data. The paradigm of required use will develop once we have really simple ways to hold data. If I were king, I would say it’s too early. Let’s muddle through the next few years. The costs are costly, but the current model of privacy will not make sense going forward.

The challenge, notes Lessig, is “a corrupt Congress” that is more interested in surveillance than markets and doing business. Perhaps that isn’t a problem, according to an Associated Press poll (which has no bias, of course!):

According to the new poll, 56 percent of Americans favor and 28 percent oppose the ability of the government to conduct surveillance on Internet communications without needing to get a warrant. That includes such surveillance on U.S. citizens. Majorities both of Republicans (67 percent) and Democrats (55 percent) favor government surveillance of Americans’ Internet activities to watch for suspicious activity that might be connected to terrorism. Independents are more divided, with 40 percent in favor and 35 percent opposed. Only a third of Americans under 30, but nearly two-thirds 30 and older, support warrantless surveillance.

Right. After all, who needs business?

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Volvo’s In-Car Delivery Service

In Volvo launches in-car package delivery service in Gothenburg, Volvo’s new service “lets you have your Christmas shopping delivered directly to your car.” Intriguing idea that saves on parking hassles like those people who are waiting/idling around the favored spots.

With just days to go before Black Friday and Cyber Monday – the busiest online shopping days of the Christmas season – Sweden’s Volvo Cars has unveiled a brand new way to take some of the hassle out Christmas shopping.

The premium car maker has launched the world’s first commercially available in-car delivery service by teaming up with PostNord, the Nordic region’s leading communication and logistics supplier, Lekmer.com, the leading Nordic online toy and baby goods store, and Mat.se, a Swedish online grocery retailer, to have Christmas toys, gifts, food and drinks delivered to its cars. …

The Volvo In-car Delivery works by means of a digital key, which is used to gain one-time access to your vehicle. Owners simply order the goods online, receive a notification that the goods have been delivered and then just drive home with them.

Alas, not available everywhere. Yet.

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Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon

Customer Commons is supporting, and board member, Mary Hodder, is hosting the Bay Area event. Additionally, there are NYC and London locations. Please join us if you are interested:

Data Privacy Legal Hackathon 2014

Data Privacy Legal Hackathon 2014

This is an unprecedented year documenting our loss of Privacy. Never before have we needed to stand up and team up to do something about it. In honour of Privacy Day, the Legal Hackers are leading the charge to do something about it, inspiring a two-day international Data Privacy Legal Hackathon. This is no ordinary event. Instead of talking about creating privacy tools in theory, the Data Privacy Legal Hackathon is about action! A call to action for tech & legal innovators who want to make a difference!

We are happy to announce a Data Privacy Legal Hackathon and invite the Kantara Community to get involved and participate. We are involved in not only hosting a Pre-Hackathon Project to create a Legal Map for consent laws across jurisdictions, but the CISWG will also be posting a project for the Consent Receipt Scenario that is posted in on the ISWG wiki.

The intention is to hack Open Notice with a Common Legal Map to create consent receipts that enable ‘customisers’ to control personal information If you would like to get involved in the hackathon, show your support, or help build the consent receipt infrastructure please get involved right away — you can get intouch with Mark (dot) Lizar (at)gmail (dot) com, Hodder (at) gmail (dot) com, or join the group pages that are in links below.

Across three locations on February 8th & 9th, 2014, get your Eventbrite Tickets Here:

* New York City * London, UK * San Francisco *

http://legalhackers.org/privacyhack2014/

This two-day event aims to mix the tech and legal scenes with people and companies that want to champion personal data privacy. Connecting entrepreneurs, developers, product makers, legal scholars, lawyers, and investors.

Each location will host a two-day “judged” hacking competition with a prize awarding finale, followed by an after-party to celebrate the event.

The Main Themes to The Hackathon Are:

  • Crossing the Pond Hack
  • Do Not Track Hack
  • Surveillance & Anti-Surveillance
  • Transparency Hacks
  • Privacy Policy Hack
  • Revenge Porn Hack

Prizes will be awarded:

  • 1st Prize:  $1,000
  • 2nd Prize:  $500
  • 3rd Prize: $250

There are pre-hackathon projects and activities. Join the Hackerleague to participate in these efforts and list your hack:

Sponsorship Is Available & Needed

Any organization or company seeking to show active support for data privacy and privacy technologies is invited to get involved.

  • Sponsor: prizes, food and event costs by becoming a Platinum, Gold or Silver Sponsor
  • Participate: at the event by leading or joining a hack project
  • Mentor: projects or topics that arise for teams, and share your expertise.

 

Contact NYC sponsorship: Phil Weiss email or @philwdjjd

Contact Bay Area sponsorship: Mary Hodder – Hodder (at) gmail (dot) com – Phone: 510 701 1975

Contact London sponsorship: Mark Lizar – Mark (dot) Lizar (at)gmail (dot) com – Phone: +44 02081237426 – @smarthart

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Omie Update (version 0.2)

We’re overdue an update on the Omie Project…., so here goes.

To re-cap:

We at Customer Commons believe there is room/ need for a device that sits firmly on the side of the individual when it comes to their role as a customer or potential customer.
That can and will mean many things and iterations over time, but for now we’re focusing on getting a simple prototype up and running using existing freely available components that don’t lock us in to any specific avenues downstream.
Our role is demonstrate the art of the possible, catalyse the development project, and act to define what it means to ‘sit firmly on the side of the customer’.
For now, we’ve been working away behind the scenes, and now have a working prototype (Omie 0.2). But before getting into that, we should cover off the main questions that have come up around Omie since we first kicked off the project.

What defines an Omie?

At this stage we don’t propose to have a tight definition as the project could evolve in many directions; so our high level definition is that an Omie is ‘any physical device that Customer Commons licenses to use the name, and which therefore conforms to the ‘customer side’ requirements of Customer Commons.

Version 1.0 will be a ‘Customer Commons Omie’ branded white label Android tablet with specific modifications to the OS, an onboard Personal Cloud with related sync options, and a series of VRM/ Customer-related apps that leverage that Personal Cloud.

All components, wherever possible, will be open source and either built on open specs/ standards, or have created new ones. Our intention is not that Customer Commons becomes a hardware manufacturer and retailer; we see our role as being to catalyse a market in devices that enable people in their role of ‘customer’, and generate the win-wins that we believe this will produce. Anyone can then build an Omie, to the open specs and trust mechanisms.

What kind of apps can this first version run?

We see version 1 having 8 to 10 in-built apps that tackle different aspects of being a customer. The defining feature of all of these apps is that they all use the same Personal Cloud to underpin their data requirements rather than create their own internal database.

Beyond those initial apps, we have a long list of apps whose primary characteristic is that they could only run on a device over which the owner had full and transparent control.

We also envisage an Omie owner being able to load up any other technically compatible app to the device, subject to health warnings being presented around any areas that could breach the customer-side nature of the device.

How will this interact with my personal cloud?

As noted above, we will have one non-branded Personal Cloud in place to enable the prototyping work (on device and ‘in the cloud’), but we wish to work with existing or new Personal Cloud providers wishing to engage with the project to enable an Omie owner to sync their data to their branded Personal Clouds.

Where are we now with development?

We now have a version 0.2 prototype, some pics and details are below. We intend, at some point to run a Kickstarter or similar campaign to raise the funds required to bring a version 1.0 to market. As the project largely uses off the shelf components we see the amount required being around $300k. Meantime, the core team will keep nudging things forward.

How can I get involved?

We are aiming for a more public development path from version 0.3. We’re hoping to get the Omie web site up and running in the next few weeks, and will post details there.

Alternatively, if you want to speed things along, please donate to Customer Commons.

VERSION 0.2

Below are a few pics from our 0.2 prototype.

Home Screen – Showing a secure OS, a working, local Personal Cloud syncing to ‘the cloud’ for many and varied wider uses. This one shows the VRM related apps, there is another set of apps underway around Quantified Self.

Omie 0.2 Home Screen

My Suppliers – Just as a CRM system begins with a list of customers, a VRM device will encompass a list of ‘my suppliers’ (and ‘my stuff’).

Omie 0.2 My Suppliers

My Transactions – Another critical component, building my transaction history on my side.

Omie 0.2 Transactions

Intent Casting/ Stroller for Twins – Building out Doc’s classic use case, real time, locally expressed intention to buy made available as a standard stream of permissioned data. Right now there are about 50 online sellers ‘listening’ for these intent casts, able to respond, and doing business; and 3 CRM systems.

Omie 0.2 Intent Casting

So what have we learned in the build of version 0.2?

Firstly, that it feels really good to have a highly functional, local place for storing and using rich, deep personal information that is not dependent on anyone else or any service provider, and has no parts of it that are not substitutable.

Secondly, that without minimising the technical steps to take, the project is more about data management than anything else, and that we need to encourage a ‘race to the top’ in which organisations they deal with can make it easy for customers to move data backwards and forwards between the parties. Right now many organisations are stuck in a negative and defensive mind-set around receiving volunteered information from individuals, and very few are returning data to customers in modern, re-usable formats through automated means.

Lastly that the types of apps that emerge in this very different personal data eco-system are genuinely new functions not enabled by the current eco-system, and not just substitutes for those there already. For example, the ‘smart shopping cart’ in which a customer takes their requirements and preferences with them around the web is perfectly feasible when the device genuinely lives on the side of the customer.

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Surf safely with Web Pal

It’s time to draw the line on surveillance.

Today nearly every commercial website infects our browsers with tracking files that report our activities back to parties we may not know or trust.

So we’re providing a way to draw that line:  Web Pal — a browser extension that blocks tracking and advertising*, eliminating the browser slowdowns caused by both.

Download the Web Pal here, from the Chrome Web Store
And click on the donate button to support our work.

Web Pal was developed for Customer Commons by Emmett Global, which provides privacy solutions to nonprofits. It combines Adblock Plus and Tampermonkey — two open source code bases — in one simple install that requires no additional work or maintenance. It also gives you a Customer Commons start page, which carries updates of news about surveillance and other topics of interest to Customer Commons members.

Here’s a video explaining the Web Pal:

We offer the Web Pal on Chrome. This gives you one safe browser with maximized protection, and the opportunity both to try out other protection systems on other browsers and to compare performance.  Here is a list of those systems, from ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society:

Abine † Do Not Track MeDeleteMeMaskMe PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extensions and services
AdBlock Plus Ad and tracking blocking.
Emmett † “An easy to install browser plugin that protects your privacy online”
Collusion Firefox add-on for viewing third parties tracking your movements
Disconnect.me † browser extentions to stop unwanted tracking, control data sharing
Ghostery † browser extension for tracking and controlling the trackers
Privacyfix † “One dashboard for your Facebook®, LinkedIn®, and Google® privacy. Blocks over 1200 trackers.”
PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers
Privowny † – “Your personal data coach. Protect your identity/privacy. Track what the Internet knows about you.”

Note that these are maintained on a wiki and subject to change. In fact, we invite Customer Commons members to participate in ProjectVRM, and help drive development of these and other tools.

And, of course, we welcome feedback and suggestions for improving the Web Pal. And we encourage everybody to support development of all tools and services that make customers liberated, powerful and respected in the open marketplace.


* What Adblock Plus calls acceptable ads are passed through by default, but you can change it to block all ads. Just go to Chrome’s Windows menu and click down through Extensions / Emmett Web Pal / Options / Adblock Plus / Filter List. Then uncheck “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”.

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For personal data, use value beats sale value

There’s an argument that goes like this:

  1. Companies are making money with personal data, and
  2. They are getting this data for free. Therefore,
  3. People should be able to make money with that data too.

This is not helpful framing, if we want to get full value out of our personal data. Or even to understand what the hell personal data is.

Stop and think about this for a second:

That data has far more use value than sale value. This use value is almost entirely untapped. Thinking about its sale value requires that you think the same way big companies do. This is as big a mistake in 2013 as it was —

  • in 1980 to think about personal computing in terms of what big enterprises did with mainframes; and
  • in 1993 to think about personal networking in terms of services provided by phone and cable companies.

In 1982 the IBM PC came along, and MS-DOS. And then the Macintosh in 1984. By 1985  there were tens of thousands of personal apps running on personal computers, doing far more than any company could do with its own computers, no matter how big those computers were. This turned out to be good for everybody, including the big companies with the big computers.

Likewise, in 1995 the Internet came along in a big way (ISPs, email, browsing, dial-up, e-commerce), and within months it was clear than anybody could network together with anybody else in the world at a cost that rounded to zero, and with a degree of freedom that was unimaginable within the systems controlled by phone and cable companies.  (Eighteen years later, the phone and cable companies, with help from the copyright maximalists in Hollywood, are still trying to corral the Net’s horse back into the old barn.)

What companies are doing with your personal data today is all happening inside a B2B — Business-to-Business — context. That context is as limited as mainframe thinking in 1980 and telco/cableco thinking in 1993.

The other day in London we were talking with Nic Brisbourne about the massive quantity of opportunity and ready-to-spend money on the demand side of the marketplace — and the ironic absence (outside the still-small VRM world) of interest by developers in equipping demand to engage and drive supply. The market seem stuck inside the same old supply-driving-demand mentality. That’s what you hear coming from the mainframe-think world of Big Data mongering and analytics today.

Mind these words: Big Data talk today is as clueless about what people can do for themselves as mainframe talk was in 1980 and networking talk was in 1993. It’s big business-as-usual, in its big B2B bubble, talking itself into ever-ripening stages of vulnerability to massive disruption by the C’s of the world.

Speaking of which, we also met in Europe with Qiy, MesInfos, MidataIntently, Mydex, Privowny and other VRM efforts (who will be insulted that I haven’t yet listed them here, but we can correct that). All of them are laying the groundwork required for unlocking the full use value of personal data — and not just its sale value, which is tiny at best anyway. Bravo for them, and for us as the beneficiaries of their good work.

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