The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a great commentary by Eva Galperin that describes traitorware: “devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.” Basically, she’s describing nearly every digital tool that we use and carry, from printers to cell phones and CDs. Somebody is collecting all kinds of information about you in non-volunteered ways. This information includes your location and movements, device identity codes, all of the very intimate details of your life and activities. This term acts as a wake up call: the technology is only going to evolve to detect and discover more details about our selves and our environment.
Coaching moment: The alarming thing about this post, and why I’m happy that EFF is watching developments in this area, is that surreptitious tracking is non-voluntary. We do not know when we purchase our devices what kind of information is being collected and sent back to various hidden interests. The collection of details includes information that we may not wish to share with unknown sources, for unknown purposes about our location, our social network, or personal health, or any other details about our existence. Do we have a choice? More now than we will if we do nothing until later. Write a letter to your congressperson. Talk with your friends. Turn off Fox. Hey, if you’d like to thank EFF for their work in this area, here’s one way.
With the rapid growth and use of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and many others, there’s a growing interest by service providers, marketers, and hosting companies in mapping this fertile ground. Your network (online and in person) is where your reputation resides. What does your network say about you?
What to Measure?
IBM (a company with more than 38,000 patents) published a paper called Social Ties and Their Relevance to Churn in Mobile Telecom Networks in which the authors point out that it’s not the individuals that are important. It’s their relationships. From the abstract, “Exploring the nature and strength of these ties can help understand the structure and dynamics of social networks and explain real-world phenomena, ranging from organizational efficiency to the spread of information and disease.”
The bottom line here is that if enough of your friends don’t like something, there’s a tipping point where people start changing to something else. In the case of mobile phones, for instance, lots of people will get a new phone when their provider becomes a problem, and their friends agree about that problem.
There are two parts to this issue. First: whether you are a leader or a follower. Marketers and advertisers really care about leaders because they will influence their friends to do (or not do) something. Second: the mapping process can get rather personal. The IBM paper above looks at the “aggregate” or group behavior of a network. However, tools can be tuned or created to be very specific about your network: whom you see, how often, and who else they’re connected to.
In the case of politics where transparency is informative, you can see nice, detailed visualizations of networks at work around TARP (the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or “bank bailout” money), federal funding earmarks, or health care. But what about when it gets personal?
Coaching moment: Records of your relationships and your network are everywhere: in your social networks, in your email, on your phone, records of bridge tolls, and more. The mapping technology doesn’t yet work in real-time, but it’ll happen. By itself, this isn’t the major concern for me. The really big problem lies in the fact that we don’t have rules for how this information can or should be used.
Our corporations do not have the same concerns, priorities, or moral compass that people do. Corporations are motivated by what the company can do that is profitable and makes their shareholders happy. There are no laws or other forms of guidance about what proper social behavior is, largely because as a society or a culture, we’ve never talked about it.
I suggest now is a good time to start talking. With your friends. What do you want in an Information Policy Platform?
There’s a good chance that you’ve signed up for several online accounts, and now you have several different online identities (user names, passwords, and search and purchasing histories). If you use social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (there are so many more!), you probably spend time socializing and sharing information online every day. One person, many identities. That can be a problem.
Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.
I’m particularly interested in one of Owyang’s Five Eras of the Social Web:
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
There is a lot of work being done in this area, giving the power to centrally control and keep accurate information about ourselves. One name for it is “user-driven services.” I’ll be writing more on this very empowering concept in posts to come.
Coaching moment: if you were to collect all of your information in one place then selectively share some of it with various online services, what would that look like? Think about all of the data (searches, emails, tweets, posts, etc.) that you’ve generated this week. Which ones are you happy to share with the public forever? If not everything, what would you protect, for how long, and why?
(Holy cats: 10 days since my last post. Where does the time go?)
A little while ago I had the distinct joy of talking with my friend Jean Russell when she was en route to Boston. I always come away from our conversations with a warm glow and lots to write about. Alas, I did not get my thinking into words fast enough to do justice to our conversation about social networks, and how we effectively (creatively) integrate and braid the threads, interests, and work of our lives with our friends, colleagues, and supportive strangers. I do remember that as she was arriving at her destination with time to spare, I was able to call another friend (hey Judy!) in Boston and hook them up. Each of them reported having a fascinating conversation; both reported that the timing was weird and interesting. That’s sometimes how networks work.
This taps into a post that Jean has today about becoming “sticky” in other people’s memory. Jean is a busy gal:
I “follow” abut 700 people on twitter, with about 1000 following me. At scale like this, the question I often am asked is, “How do you remember all those people?”
You know that anyone whose “network [is] made of hundreds of brilliant, interesting, inspiring, compassionate people” is a person to be reckoned with. Additionally, you know that getting a new job or new clients is often (at least partly) about who you know and word-of-mouth. It’s worth noting that your social network can help raise you up in times of need, and all boats rise with you (meaning others benefit too).
Coaching moment: Your reputation is part of who you are. Your social network is where your reputation resides. This doesn’t mean that you need to use all of the social media tools available. Pick one or two and try them out. If they feel right, add a few friends and keep testing. If not, delete that account if you can, and start on a new service. You might wish to find a service where your friends are (like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn) and start there, as your friends will be your early support for exploration and learning.
Yesterday Google announced Friend Connect, and Facebook announced Facebook Connect. These are two different ways of opening the social network. John (The Real) McCrea has a great article on these two services. ReadWriteWeb also has a great article (thanks Alex K for this link).
With some mixed* feelings, I’m implementing Google’s Friend Connect on this blog. In the right column, you’ll see a box… Read more…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a great commentary by Eva Galperin that describes traitorware: “devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.” Basically, she’s describing nearly every digital tool that we use and carry, from printers to cell phones and CDs. Somebody is collecting all kinds of information about you in non-volunteered ways. This information includes your location and movements, device identity codes, all of the very intimate details of your life and activities. This term acts as a wake up call: the technology is only going to evolve to detect and discover more details about our selves and our environment.![[del.icio.us]](http://digitalidcoach.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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