One the one hand, there is no sugar-coating the fact that there are bad people out there that will do bad things if they have access to your personal data, and the easier it is for them to get their hands on that data, the more likely bad stuff will happen.

The counter to that reality, however, is that the cow has left the barn already, and it ‘aint coming back so the best alternative is to embrace TRANSPARENCY.

This logic of transparency is based on the premise that if we all have access to the same set of public data, better tools can be built to manage it, better laws can be crafted that legislate acceptable use and tougher penalties can be put on the books for criminal offenders.

A lot of my thinking in this area was inspired by a book called The Transparent Society by David Brin. Must read, IMHO, given our shared interests in understanding the privacy paradox.

Btw, if interested, I wrote a post that looks at privacy in the context of social networks and people pages (and anticipates some application use cases). Here is the URL:

Spock, social networks and online privacy
http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2007/12/spock-social-ne.html

Cheers,

Mark

I smell 1998 all over again

Carmelo Lisciotto

Great post and comments.

Absolutely right — this is about the me-centric MY-world in the new web.

Being new, we need lots of use examples. We try to contribute a piece in this new web of data.

Regards,
MyMesh.com
-a social mesh interconnecting friends and data on different networks.

To therealmccrea, will check out the post. Thanks.

To Ben, am familiar (at a high level) with the data portability standards push, and all for standards but in this business there is always the paradox between building a spec and waiting for standard boards to bless and solving a problem that market embraces and then trying to standardize. Not an either/or, just a statement on the paradox, as history suggests that market success tends to validate itself. As to the economics and ownership questions, I think that if google had asked for permission before rolling out adwords, they probably would have had a very different outcome than rolling it out, proving out and then offering adsense as the “upside surprise” for publishers.

To markdykeman, I am less starting from the perspective of ANY piece of content and more starting from MY OWN content, basically trying to reconcile the fact that much of this content gets distributed to different sites, making it harder to manage, track, iterate, etc. That said, some of this thinking does logically lead to content being portable from the get-go by virtue of tools systematizing what today is a hodge podge. I would also suggest that such a model if anything makes content less of a commodity, as over time all sorts of interesting meta-information starts to accumulate around each content item, opening up interesting application scenarios.

To Emil, will check out your post. To the why would google open this data up, I can think of two reasons. One, the more Google is willing to share the data it has on me in a value added fashion, the more it is in my self-interest to give Google more access to that data (via cookie, client side run times, etc.). It’s akin to the credit bureaus providing access to credit reports, although Google’s mission is organizing all of the worlds information so anything that can get consumers to be helpers in this mission, seems to be a good thing for them. Two is as alluded to in the column. Google is trying to build up an apps play that is one part Amazon Web Services and one part disrupt Microsoft. They are adequate at best at apps side TODAY. They have a serious unfair advantage on analytics type of data/systems so by leading with their unfair advantage they can offer something that the others can’t, and lets not forget a big part of the goodness of adwords/adsense is all of the visibility data they provide to advertisers and publishers so its not like this is uncharted ground.

To MS, whille OpenSocial is somewhat (but not totally) orthogonal, it is another affirmation of the point that Google does see it in their best interest for open standards to proliferate, and have provided robust APIs on many of their own products. What they haven’t done a good job on is connecting the dots between their various products (analytics doesn’t talk so well to adwords which doesn’t integrate with feedburner; google maps APIs don’t have the same interfaces as YouTube, and so on.)

To ronald, information is a broad bucket covering but highly structured (e.g., a sales database) and unstructured (e.g., a photo) pieces of data. On the web, it is probably simplest to thing of all of the things that you might put online, share, comment on, rate, etc. and work from there. If you just start with what google organizes (makes searchable) top level, that is a good start — web pages, images, maps, news stories, product listings, email, video, your desktop files, books, blogs, etc. It is a meaty list.

Mark

Google has actually been quite cooperative on this front with their OpenSocial initiative (I know it’s not really what we need!) and their Social Graph API - which is a good step in this direction.

rnWritten by Mark Sigal, a digital media and Internet platform entrepreneur who has done…

And while I was writing this comment here, a colleague of mine (who sent me the link to your post) asked the logical question (over Skype, of course): why would Google (or any of the big data silos) share back exactly the meta-data that makes their own service valuable?