Digital ID Coach

On Sharing Information

February 15th, 2010

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Every day we visit sites, exchange email, post comments or status updates, and otherwise exchange data with lots of servers on the Internet. Much of the time we know and voluntarily offer our information, such as typing search terms to learn something, or offering our name, address and credit card to make a purchase. Our exchanges also transfer information about us that we may not be aware of, such as our IP address, our browser, and the type of operating system we’re using.

Despite our “agreeing” to various sites’ Terms of Service when we sign up for an account, we do not generally “volunteer” to be tracked, our habits quantified, categorized and sold. That raises the question: what if we could control more of what we exchanged? Would we? What would it take?

Obviously stores want to know if we are a serious customer: if we’re looking for the purpose of actually buying, if we can afford the items we’re looking at, and if they should use those items to suggest additional items we might be interested in (or if it was a gift to someone else and we have no personal interest in that item). For example, car dealers would save billions of dollars each year if they could identify serious and qualified buyers without having to create advertisements for television, magazines and newspapers, and billboards everywhere. In fact, it would probably be worth something to us as a serious shopper if we could identify ourselves as such ahead of time and especially during sales negotiations.

Like the car buying story above, scenarios are stories that we tell to help us understand complex environments. Chris Carfi did four nice overview examples in his Social Customer Manifesto’s VRM scenarios. The world of information sharing is complex in many ways: personally (what do I want to share?), politically/regulatorily, in commerce, technologically, and more.

Digital ID Coach is organizing a day-long workshop to look at this subject. We will be engaged in Rapid Scenario Development (a process that usually takes days or weeks). If you’re in the San Francisco bay area on May 16, you’re invited to join us. If not, stay tuned; we’ll be posting notes from that workshop.

Coaching moment: It’s worth thinking about how we use technology, and how it helps us do what we want to do. Technology such as computers, phones, and even programmable devices like thermostats and switches, have obvious benefits like aiding communications or saving energy. Technology also has a cost, like learning to use it or controlling things you don’t want it to do.

In the case of information technology, you’re empowered to connect to friends and resources but you also trade information about your location and other details. Since this will never be a case of only responding to your needs and never exchanging (which technically doesn’t work since the info needs to know where you are to respond to your request), we need to think about that exchange. What would help us the most? What would you be comfortable telling others about?

This is complex because it probably depends on each exchange. However, we can determine policies for general use in categories like “collect but don’t distribute without my express permission,” or “forward at will, this is something I want.” What categories or practices would you suggest?

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