Last week Thomas Roessler (@roessler) posted a blog post on the efforts of w3c to define a “do not track” standard {worth a read} which is designed to protect users from being tracked without their permission. And that got me thinking — not a good thing I know :-) — about user data & permissions in general.
The ability to allow users to control how their data is being used will be critically important for the future of the social web and is something that needs to be addressed before we can realize the true potential of social computing. People need to know:
- What data (social & non-social, Internet & Intranet) is being syphoned off?
[Tweets, blog posts or comments, forums, click-throughs, e-mails, meeting minutes] - How its being used?
[Content redistributed, analyzed & derived data redistributed] - What insights are being derived from it?
[Topic interests, social profiles, social networks, affiliations, sentiment, opinion] - How those insights will be used?
[Targeted marketing, law enforcement, credit ratings, recruitment, expertise location, employee performance]
Without the ability to provide very precise levels of transparency I believe social analytics has the risk of being crippled. {And here I am talking about both Internet and Intranet scenarios which both face similar, abeit slightly differently worded, challenges}
Last week I wrote a blog post titled “Copyright! Do we want our cake and eat it too?” where I raised the thorny subject of copyright infringement of freely available web content. Anyone who had ever applied content analytics to web content, has likely run into a heated conversation with their legal dept on this very subject. The response from our understandably cautious legal profession is generally a variation of No!
For consuming content we need the ability to apply granular controls — from source (website, blog, file-system) down to document (web page, blog post, twitter conversation, e-mail thread) or paragraph (blog comment, e-mail, tweet). And these controls also need to inform how the content can subsequently be used — what insights are derived, how will they be used, and who owns them? Ownership being possibly one of the more interesting questions; as per recent scuffles between Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (who claim they own your data and don’t want to let you export it anywhere) with Google+ (who is taking the opposite position).
- Google+ forces us to question who owns our digital identity
- Social circle and content [nice initial attempt from Google for social transparency]
- Who owns your online identity?
- Evolving rules for social media compliance & privacy
- Shuttle Pictures Raise Debate Around Social Media Content Ownership
- Who Owns Your Company’s Social Media Profiles, Contacts & Content?
We need this level of transparency and control if we don’t want people to just turn off all or part-of the social hose-pipe. Its simple risk/reward. For example; John may be happy to share his social data for special offers or improved search, but not for financial or insurance evaluations.
This is a similar challenge with enterprise data, where you may in fact never want (or be allowed) to share certain data with the broader organization (customer emails, for example), but may be happy to share some derived insights (I am working with an automotive client) in order to get better content or people recommendations to help you close that big opportunity.
Its a tricky problem to solve, and one which requires content and social media providers, technology vendors, standards bodies, and lawyers, to get around the table. However if we don’t solve this we are going to be faced with a quagmire that will bury social innovation. Of that I am sure…
And on that happy note I sign off :)
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 