Digital ID Coach » history

The secret life of your personal data

coach — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:46:06 +0000

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings wrote about this great 3 minute video by Michael Rigley, a graphic design student. Rigley says about his video:

Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.

In fact, the level of surveillance is profound, and the lack of transparency and personal control is not about inspiring “consumer” trust. Powerful entities have long deciding what information is appropriate for the masses. We may not notice that when we search for “java,” we tend to get more of what we were looking for last: the beverage, the programming language, or the island.

Coaching moment: Some people say “yeah, so what?” Some are concerned that this is a violation of our privacy, or our self-determination. Other people say it’s good that people are helping us sort through what we need, making the world more convenient for us. Are these assumptions fair? Appropriate? Safe? What do they prevent? Do you care? Why or why not?

PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:39:07 +0000

Session with Terence Craig and Mary Ludloff, PatternBuilders. Terence: their book is Privacy and Big Data (O’Reilly).

Things have changed in privacy and personal information. PII-driven business models (later). Data collectors are the engine: giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, also organizations and agencies like Florida DMV (sold data to LexisNexus), also mom & pop operations. What makes information valuable? Your health and wealth, the networking you do, the Internet of things (you). What role to the aggregators play: markets for buying and selling data. Uses are infinite: research, monitoring, predictive modeling, advertising…

PII-driven business models:

Platform plays (SAS, Hadoop, Revolution, Microsoft’s SharingInsight, CouchDB, etc.) – where everything is phoning home all the time.
Social plays: LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus and Foursquare, but mobile is not this change. Also KISSmetrics, Klout, Zinga, hootsuite, radian6.
Goverment plays: TSA and NSA, FBI, IRS, can buy from Facebook, Palantir (DOD).
Privacy plays: SafetyWeb, reputation.com, TRUSTe, Singly, also Intellilight (in Detroit, attached to street lights where if there are a couple of people are there it turns audio mike and calls police), Spokeo, Datong
Everyone plays: not just about advertising, many industries and business models benefit.

Implications for all PII players: privacy expectations, regulatory adherence (global), transparency (toward customers), crisis management. Privacy concerns are growing with consumers. Government is signalling that concern with new legislation. Companies must invest in this area, including training and certification.

Regulations: it’s confusing and will get more so. US: >30 federal states, >100 state regs for data security privacy. EU, pending legislation adds more. Bottom line; you’re going to need help here. Be transparent, be explicit about what you can’t provide. Use opt-in data options only.

Crisis management: when things to wrong, know how you are going to deal with them. Get a team and process in place. It’s about staying with the story if you can (used to be getting ahead of the story, now stay with). How to avoid a train wreck: be transparent, think global, be ready for breaches, behave as if you were worth your customers’ trust.

Question: opt-in: don’t short the short-term: be transparent. Opt in is a good way for customers to choose, is sticky.

PII 2011: Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:48:59 +0000

On this panel: Kara Swisher, All Things D, moderates panel with Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer, Intellus, David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google (Plus), Roger McNamee, musician and Elevation Partners, and Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures.

Kara: We’ll be talking about implications of social sharing for business. Where is the business of social sharing? Fred: Facebook plus, FB is the largest platform but not the only. There will continue to be lots of important social platforms outside of FB. Roger: period of rapid adoption for first 2 years, FB has won the largest share. Cost of entry is high, social is everywhere. David: once things are that way they tend to stay that way? We didn’t name Google Plus “new, now, here” – two things we wanted to do: existing products could be done better, we saw a lot of our products would be better with baked-in sharing. Wanted to improve overall connected state. Jim: things swing from open to closed and back. Fred: top things include Tumblr, wouldn’t be in the picture but for… Mobile is really important. It’s not game over. FB is dominant but market is not devoid of opportunities. Roger: web as an app, number is going to 70% (of what?). Who is going to control the user experience? Things are not shipping on mobile. FB for many people is going to be the platform; connect then identity. Jim: we’re in the process of mapping humanity online. This is a big one. It really does a disservice to say it’s done. How are we mapping? What’s appropriate? rights? mapping social rituals. Of course there will be platforms, and we’re just getting started.

Kara: what are the key critical trends? Jim: we’re going through a new reality, reputation online, a 360 view. You can now reach across time/space. It takes a village, and we’re doing this one hut at a time, building intimate connections. David: I agree with mobile, always on. Shift to living in a world where we’re always on, leaking and sharing, what do we do with that? Kara; continuous partial attention? David: yes, how subconscious should we be? Shift to assuming the camera is always rolling. Jim: this is something we need to get use to. David: there are “many publics” (Kevin Marks said this first). Fred: Tablet is interesting. People are starting to build natively for tablets. More companies are coming to us where FB is the only login experience. This will accrue tremendous value to FB, that’s not really a good thing, especially for the developer (or the users!).

Kara: mobile platforms? Roger: Facebook and Yelp as mobile. Time to market. The thing that really scares me: we’ve lived in a world where people have not been honest with each other for too long. Income gap based on proprietary access to opportunities. Big corps (including telcos) are absolutely using our data. Jim: we’re moving through a threshold. FB is assumed to be public but it’s mostly private. (?) Social media has been like Lake Wobegone, was powerful but there’s going to be interesting consequences: what do people know about me? New product where people can know what we know about them. Too voyeuristic, not narcissistic enough.

Kara: what is sharing now? Fred: when you go out on Friday night, there’s a tremendous amount of sharing going on. Social media is doing the sort of the same thing. This morning was sad about Zucotti Park, human nature to want to share. My kids are much more aware of how to use the technology. David: the way my kids use “stalker” has become a casual term. Fred: I stalk my kids on FB every day, they know it. Jim: Kids know the difference between public and public/private spaces, they’re much more nuanced about how they approach the world. Fred: we’re doing this hire, looking at all of the social media resources of potential candidates. Next generation is using tools to make “resumes” more interesting.

Kara: If FB is the main stalking platform, what are the main business opportunities? Roger: social is today what “new media” is in 1987. My sense: new environment (half cell phones, half computers) is “hypernet” with totally different economic players. Running out of wireless bandwidth, need to replace infrastructure in cellular. Apple’s position is really unstable, capturing the value through hardware. HTML5 has opportunities to change the rules of the game. Safari gets 100% of development today, but notion of one company capturing all the value needs to change. Gigantic change wave of the hypernet, based on whitespace and digital TV spectrum. Instagram is fun but not important.

Kara to David: Google Plus? Tried to have a quiet debut. “We shipped plus, now we’re shipping the Google.” Two things we want to solve: one is how can we make YouTube, Blogger better by making it more social. Fred: Socialization of Google and mobile apps: eventually they’ll get it right but it’s crazy to think of it as a Facebook killer. Roger: maybe a Twitter killer, because they captured the “twitteratti” early on. Costs zero to add a Plus button. Jim: the big opportunity is what you can do with data. Focus on private data becoming public: more frictionless sharing. Understanding data is hugely disruptive. Use cases, danger is in inappropriate use. How do we use the public data to infer amazing things about each other?

Kara: Are you investing in data companies? Fred: we like to invest in platforms that have a lot of data and can use it to do things natively on the platform. We’re not investing in capturing data for 3rd party things. Kara: How do you look at Twitter? Fred: my favorite platform of all, but not as an investor–I connect to people there (@FredWilson has over 200K followers). It’s all public, everyone knows that.

Roger: two things that Apple did wrong: 1) fight with amazon over one-click, 2) if they get AppleTV right, all they have to do is in-app purchases back. Fire is not a great tablet. Fred: it’s a Kindle with the web on it. Roger: yeah. Nook is much cooler.

Questions.

PII 2011: Baking Privacy into the Business

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:03:14 +0000

This session features Lauren Gelman, BlurryEdge Strategies, and Kevin Mahaffey, Lookout Mobile Security. Kevin says most powerful force in a company is security and privacy. However, no start-up starts with Chief Privacy Officer. Lookout uses a “New York Times test”: everything you’re doing can be published on front page, including how your product works. “Everyone complains about privacy policies, but the more you can communicate with users you can avoid a whole world of pain.”

Lauren: what if your device was stolen? You probably don’t want to notify the thief that the device is being tracked. What’s your threat model? Who’s looking for your data?

Kevin: you have a choice of encrypting data or password resets. There are constraints from many interests that will prevent you from doing what you want. Trust-e is doing some good work.

In mobile space, you have more options of notifying people. Different for platform vendors and mobile developers. For mobile developers, analytics and advertising libraries–the issue is that you’re using user data to determine value. Mobile breaks down in the types of data being collected, not disclosed properly in privacy policy. All SDKs collect lots of info, hashed (sometimes with improper salting, revocation). Inherent architecture in advertising is prone to surveillance-level collection. For example, advertising sometimes passes referrer info to track conversion rates, but is creating a “worse system around” the data. Kevin’s work is trying to make process more transparent.

Each platform makes decisions about how users are going to make decisions about their use of the device. Tremendous liability for companies that misuse customer data. Users are starting to weigh this as a decision point. Compliance is a smaller part of Lauren’s work–there’s a whole lot of unregulated stuff going on. She gives a company a “gut check” on what users would think of these practices, collecting location info and what’s reasonable notice, later translation into a document.

Compliance is not big for startups. The companies that succeed are likely to be those who handle privacy best in any new field.

Questions:

Server location and data protection: different countries treat data variably, what about later when data is valuable? This is a really hard problem, best answer is locate servers in countries with best policies (Kevin Marks suggests Iceland). Have policies that spell out requirements: what you have, retention, is there another alternative to what’s normal procedures, etc. Other extremes: all user data is going into cloud such as Amazon services. This is an adjustment for people. Who holds the key?

New changes to Facebook? It’s a decision to work with them or not. Lauren doesn’t believe that Facebook-like practices will happen again. Using FB Connect is a decision to facilitate user authentication.

What do you think about AWS services, 80 page Terms of Service that allows a very invasive data policy in Amazon’s favor? Lauren: a lot of people are trusting what Amazon’s going to do. I’ve read their TOS and I don’t know what Amazon’s going to do. Important to ask about notice, what kind of policies need to be ported from cloud hosts into your products/services.

Not in this session but related: I Shared What?!? – a service that shows you what information you’re sharing when you use Facebook or FB Connect.

PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:02:44 +0000

This session is a “behind the scenes look at Micrsoft’s internal privacy program.” See the agenda for more information. Participants: Kim Howell, Reese Solberg, Michelle Bruno.

Kim Howell, (one of) Privacy Directors at Microsoft: When you’re doing a privacy review (practical, intuitive), you need to ask questions. Role playing with Reese as new company seeking a “privacy policy.” First questions (from our table discussions): what does site do, how do they collect info and what do they do with it? What’s their info flow path (is it resold?)? What’s their business model? How do you protect what you’ve collected? Controls by the individual (can visitors remove their data? remediation? transparency?)? Cookies? Other passive data collections? Countries involved (collection, use, storage)?

From Kim: Website: is this a new domain, link to privacy statement? existing privacy statement and does it match/make sure it covers everything? Data collection (see above). Send questions to new site/organization, get information, iterate. More questions: authentication, communication, vendors. Are people creating new accounts? use of email? data access requests? Vendors? Next round of questions: how well does IT + PR + Lawyers work together? Does privacy statement match the service? where’s plausible deniability? Make sure what’s required is clear, what’s optional. Provide better notice about use of information, data retention. Using HTTPS? How easy/obvious is it to obtain informed consent when signing up? Companies often think that writing a privacy statement at the last minute. (Wrong)

Next iteration: What new data is being collected? being sent where? other (new) features coming up? what info is shared? location: is it always being sent, or only in use when app is open? what other info (unique device ID, cell tower info, gender, etc.) is being sent with location data? data retention? If services changes, company may need to re-opt in application users. Privacy controls? (example of circulating the data within different departments of the company, “accounting department loves this data.”) Who needs access? for what use? access to raw data or aggregated statistics? Have data handlers been trained? Unique identifiers are not the only way of identifying a person. What’s intended use of collected data?

Michelle Bruno, Technical Privacy Manager: see printed case study (not online). Focus areas:

Level setting: focus on use of customer data, customer expectations, opting out
Author guidance: “how to” guides, privacy review checklist, company activities, data sharing, research and betas
Position yourself: pro-business privacy message, culture of privacy as a value-add
Piggyback: identify existing processes that you can take advantage of: spec templates, guidelines, bug tracking, testing, release management…
Analyze and assess: comprehensive data-gathering plan to understand company’s risk
Educate: pro-privacy contacts in each group to help succeed, spread work to peers about new process/resources
Identify triage partners: incident handling, partnerships in legal, customer support, operations, PR
Measure: what are your success metrics?

Questions: tension between user controls and corporate collections? Make sure value matches, is understood by both sides. Look at what business can put in place to allow better user controls. Microsoft has a federated privacy team, Kim’s team defines what compliance looks like.

Not mentioned in this panel but of some related interest (about Terms, not Privacy Policies): TOSAmend and EFF‘s TOSback.

PII 2011 Venture Forum Breakfast

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:29:03 +0000

This should be an interesting kick-off to a fascinating day. Disclosure: the breakfast at PII 2011 Venture Forum is sponsored by C-PET, the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies. I hadn’t heard of this organization before today. It’s a think tank focusing on long term, transformative effects, how things fit together.

Nigel Cameron (President and CEO) notes that the gap between regular corporate culture and policy around emerging tech is large, with disparate cultures.

Jim Dempsey, Center for Democracy and Technology: works on issues affecting the Internet. There are lots of things that DC and Silicon Valley have in common: people come from all over the country, meritocracy, attraction of talent, people who are dedicated and have a vision, rapid response. DC is all about ideas. There is a culture clash among people who should be able to understand each other. DC got it right for initial policy framework for early Internet development. Now it’s under challenge.

Rebecca Lynn, Morgenthaler Ventures: She’s a VC, every company in her portfolio has a unique relationship with DC. About a year and half ago, she realized she needed to know how this all worked (then did so). Convened business competition pitch with entrepreneurs and policy makers.

Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute (started early with nanotech policy): Current (physical) arrangement of lobbyists in DC is “kind of nauseating.” Individual people are approachable. People here needed to learn the system in order to launch a rocket that the military would not shoot down. Genetic information isn’t seen as the people’s.

David Tennenhouse, New Venture Partners: work on spin-outs from corporates, has run the gamut of systems. The key interest in common between Silicon Valley and DC is innovation. DC depends on it for competitiveness, we (SV) live and breathe it. One problem: I do see two levels of engagement: 1) fly in and lobby then fly out (doesn’t do too much for long term), and 2) really influencing the agencies, agendas in an ongoing way. They can’t form agendas without substance from Silicon Valley.

Cameron: mostly wonderful people locked into a dysfunctional corporate culture–working while the ship goes down. Two questions: creative community is represented in DC by a mega technology companies (who represent too much of the past, therefore not inclined to shift the corporate culture). Lynn: Start-ups don’t have time to do this, they need to focus on their interests. Look where the money flows; people are rational actors. Hard for a VC to get behind innovation when the money in DC flows against them. Peterson: large tech companies do some wonderful things and use the word innovation, but the real deep innovation comes from small companies, competitors. Lynn: Salesforce was busy in Congress, it can be daunting to be representing a competing interest. Tennenhouse: Sources for innovation: Universities are largely government funded for research, large corporates start inventions but then spin out, scale things up. Need to make sure the invention parts stay in tact, keep government off backs of innovators. Dempsey: if goal is to promote innovation, it’s not likely to be a big company that will support it and you can’t just get the government out of the way (they facilitate). What are values that promote innovation, the Internet ecosystem? Communities can lobby for these principles.

Questions/Statements: Marcy: There’s a very different value system between policy makers in DC and working landscape in California. Need for startups to band together, need for agile legislation. John Gerard: divide is not cultural, it’s structural. What focuses our energy? Global trademarks (e.g., Facebook pages). Gene Cavanaugh: WIPO has it’s problems but that’s where international trademarks are done. He represents small inventors (lawyer). What he finds is process is contorted: government is only interested in grassroots efforts is if you don’t need the money. If you don’t, the gov will fund you. (Irony alert). Agrees that there’s a structural disconnect: DC gives lots of lip service to innovation but funds top-down. Ernie Te: telecom policy and Continental Divide: systematically saw a government mindset vs entrepreneurial mindset. Government has an illusion of control, decides policy A or B for reality A or B. People in the valley understand there’s more uncertainty, will allow different approaches to be taken. Jacky (SAP): she represents industry bodies in cloud competing, wrote a blog (post) about data crossing borders, job growth globally; there’s an opportunity can enable start-ups.

Lynn: I’m more practical. There are reasons people live in Silicon Valley, the way business is done is different. Need to figure out how DC works. They’re doing things that are more entrepreneurial, but the system is different. Hopefully we can work together. Tennenhouse: Comment about the role of uncertainty in innovation: looking back, development and success are unevenly accomplished. Acknowledging difference in cultures, some agencies (inside beltway, DARPA) should be figuring out how to do it, suggests partnership systems. Peterson: heard this from Peter Theil first: startup companies don’t have to start here, in nanotech, in Sinapore. These decisions are invisible to DC. How to make this more visible. Example: if you give up your US citizenship, you continue to pay taxes for 10 years. Braindrain if we disabled that? Lynn: cross-pollination of cultures. Bring people out here to help with translation. Dempsey: everybody is looking for failure? Unacceptable to say that 50% of R&D investments will fail. How to turn this around, make it work? Point is that failure is a successful strategy: try things that might not work is a definition of success (a Silicon Valley perspective). Think comprehensively, act incrementally. Cautiousness, conservativeness, unwillingness to try new things is a problem (DC). Cameron: it’s all about corporate culture. There are things that could be done. Get these guys (DC) to come to conferences here, get the thinking into their bloodstreams. It’s not so much about technology or process, but in DC all conversations are about debt. Look at what the questions are. We need to reshape what questions are being asked.

IIW XIII: The Final Overview

coach — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:43:59 +0000

Thanks xJason.Rogersx

What a head-filling event! If you’re interested, you can see notes from many of the sessions on the IIW wiki. Some of the sessions are rather technical, which is consistent with the roots of this unconference.

A few of the things I learned: people continue to amaze me by these projects: personal data projects (check out Personal–no notes from their demo; and soon The Locker Project), reputation sites (I was busy vouching for people whose work I know with Connect.me), the many stories of evented APIs (think actions: when something happens, it can trigger something else to happen, as in the “Internet of Things”), and of course the evolution of the Personal Data Ecosystem and PDEC.

Coaching moment: There are two major forces pushing forward. One is represented by Facebook: collect and manipulate, sell and distribute all of the personal data that can be found. This is a pulling, pillaging process with the “users” as the product being sold. The other force is not yet represented, but you might think of it as an opposite: individual people have access to their own data when they need it, using starter organizing, permissioning, sharing and distribution tools. What if you could say “No Facebook, you can’t plunder my own and my friends’ data–and mean it? What if advertisers came to you when you wanted? The idea is to say “yes” and “no” to data sharing when it’s appropriate for you. It’s you who is important, not a product.

IIW XIII: PDEC Technical Documentation Group

coach — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:46:44 +0000

Markus pointed out that the purpose of PDEC is to help coordinate and educate, facilitate dialog in the system. Most of our current work is on the legal and business level, and also needs to happen on technical level. PDEC is trying to catalyze the ecosystem. One of the important promises of the ecosystem is the interoperability; needs some technical work/agreement/understanding. We’re not about setting standards, we’re about discovery, conversation, documentation. Technical profiles of the different projects, what exposed schemas and APIs, how it’s exposed, what strategies are in use.

Proposal to collect a set of questions that will help inform the dialog:

data model/schema for personal data
technology endpoints: API, network protocols, interface
what do they offer: query, import/export, update, delete
technology for protecting privacy/control: cryptography?
client support: mobiles? desktop? browser plug-ins?
developer resources: libraries? wikis?
notion of identity: un/pw?
architecture: centralized? open?
data portability

Interoperability:

What’s required to establish interoperability?
What’s in their future plans?
Can your project work with someone else’s project?

Documentation steps:

Document technical profile — with temporal attribute (what tech now, what changes coming?)
Interoperability: do you have interoperability with another member of the ecosystem? or planning to do?
(TBD)

Proposal suggested that we put a set of questions up and propose member organizations post responses (RSS or other) to help “cat herding” of the information. Proposal suggested to organize info in three columns: name, tech keywords, brief description. Proposal to pre-define businesses (personal data store) then differentiate between those companies/projects. Some questions won’t apply equally to all companies in the startup circle.

Survey Examples (does this format work?):

Technology	Personal.com	Locker Project	Gluu/SAML appliance
Data model/schema	own schema (gems)	x	x
Tech for sharing	RDF endpoints, oAuth?	x	XDI, LDAP, SAML for federation
Protecting privacy/controls	x	x	x
Client support	x	x	x

Need to do more thinking on how to collect/organize this information.

IIW XIII: Personal Data Ecosystem Overview

coach — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:50:29 +0000

Good attendance, very diverse industry representation! Thanks Joseph from Broadridge for his chair in our crowded room, allowing me to take notes.

Kaliya showed a slide of PDEC landscape: Personal zone overlapping with Accountability “Trust” Frameworks which contained Personal Data Zone, also overlapping with the Market. At bottom of this landscape view: Governance through Legal, Code, Identifiers, and Peers–who act as framework creators.

Slide of PDEC Startup Circle. Joining is a peer-reviewed process, what open standards are they using, what’s their value space/where are they coming from. Leaders consider if group qualifies; trying to cultivate “an industry collaborative, engaging with technologists and business leaders from banking and finance, telecom, cable, web, advertising, media and other industries seeking to understand opportunities, launch pilot projects and ultimately offer service in the ecosystem.”

Discussion about who “manages” your data as your IDP, and what personal control individuals have over that data. Is this like a bank, where you go in to withdraw all your money and get the Bank’s response “that’s our money?” Or can you withdraw your funds and walk across the street to another institution and open a new account, because your money is portable? Why would a telco worry about risk? This is a most important concept for them. Similarly in banking: board-level view is that they’re not going to be the first ones to jump. Either all jump at once or they get killed. Risk in the US of having all your funds in one institution is higher than distributed accounts. Same thing with different kinds of data, e.g., health data vs spending.

Fair Information Practices (FTC standard used for enforcement): framework when they started back in the 1970s worked, but now systems are more complex, no notice and consent about which databases we’re now part of. About time for a FIPS refresh? Kaliya is working on a paper, what are core principles and guidelines that government could adopt? Where does the thinking need to be? We have more powerful devices in our pockets. Lots of privacy conversations are about do not track/store. OECD principles are not regulations, are technology neutral (data minimization, etc.) but they don’t make assumption about individual ownership & agency over own data.

Refreshing principles is a good exercise, but one thing missing from principles is concept of fairness. Control is about fairness, fair trade and equality. Striking assymetry today. Notice and consent is not working, people can’t do much about it.

Mary quickly reviewed Organizations stewarding user driven personal data and ID. Slide includes: ProjectVRM (an ethos and conversation), WEF, PDEC, Kantara Initiative, IDCommons, UMA, Information Sharing Working Group, Open Identity Exchange, The Data Portability Project, W3C, and microformats.

Shift in focus back to PDEC’s work: What’s personal data and what’s not? What’s self-asserted data?

Kaliya showed a map of personal data (link to come), then reviewed briefly what some of the companies do in the Startup Circle. Question about business models and how those companies plan to make money. (Some uncertainty here.) What are they hoping to do, how do they see working together? Respect, collaboratively working toward interoperability, for big players to adopt or use emerging standards. Faster adoption. Is this policy or protocol standards? PDEC is about conversation, discovery and education, document activities, and catalyzing an interactive collaborative market. Paint common pictures, evolve common language.

Note: If you’re interested in this space, check back for updated links to slides and graphics that were in progress during this session.