Mike English's blog

Thanks for the comment, Jon. I agree; with relationships, the more you put in, the more you get out of them.

Thanks for the link and it appears you have some great conversation over this one. Since we have no privacy/less privacy everyday, we should try and establish something of importance and share things of value. I continue to find that more I invest, the more I get online or offline. Relationships are funny like that

~jon

Mike, perhaps the key is in giving users the choice. You can keep it private, or you can allow controlled access to it (bearing in mind that once it's out there it's out of your control), your you can open it all.

Either way the value is in you having that data at your own disposal, to do with it what you see fit. Most of us currently pro-actively share explicit data, which is an important bit, but I'm also interested in the implicit data waiting to be extracted from my own behaviour.
As you suggest, language is an extremely important component of our behaviour, and a very good candidate for analysis.
I don't necessarily go along with Linguistic Determinism, although as a teenager I used to be a hardcore determinism advocate (perhaps to the extreme of fatalism), eventually learning about quantum physics put an end to that belief. Conditioning is another matter, which I think is beyond doubt. But this is going slightly off topic.
These are very interesting times to live in. :) Thanks for your views on this.

@Daniel We're moving toward transparency at a fairly rapid pace. I think you'd be surprised how soon people will be willing to expose the degree of information you suggest. Check these articles for example:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/20/MNGMFIVF4U1.DTL (2006)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html (recent)


The younger generation is ready to provide information, so long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what. I think that knowing you're sharing data as opposed to suspecting that data is being collected about you, makes a big difference.

Regarding, your project of collecting personal data on yourself for personal gain, I'm curious where you stand on linguistic determinism. It seems like there's already a wealth of information we could collect about ourselves if we systematically wrote our thoughts and analyzed our writing.

BTW just thought I'd clarify that there is a difference between what VRM is and what I am working on, which is more of a myware application with a VRM component.

Well Mike, you are certainly not alone in this trend towards total transparency, and I would be interested to know how far people are willing to go in that regard.

BTW, I don't think we can 'own' our data. In my opinion the best we can hope for is some degree of control over it. I'm just not sure how transparency will help in gaining control of the data. Surely if it's out there it's out of our control. Anyone can use it, for whatever purpose, without us knowing anything about it. It's almost like saying: I don't like you stealing from me, so I'll just give it all away.

Personally I only became interested in privacy when I thought how interesting it would be to work on the kind of technology that I described in my first comment. To be honest, it never crossed my mind that people would agree to such a level of intrusion unless they kept total control of the data. I might be wrong, but that is something that only a good measure of market research will answer.

I'm not exactly a private person. You can probably find the whole of my on-line footprint by searching for what has become more or less my unique ID on the web: ktorn
So in a sense you could say that I'm very much aligned with the total transparency idea. Or am I?

I'm not sure that I'm prepared to share my every thought, emotion, motive, fear and desire with the world. Yet that's what I'd like to capture, so that *I* understand myself better, and so that *I* can use that insight and data for my own benefit.

In doing so, I will have a digital personal profile which is many orders of magnitude richer than the ones gathered by 3rd parties. So where's the motivation for them to pry on me and collect out-of-date footprints when the information is all in one place? All they need is to ask nicely and/or pay me, to have controlled access to some of that data. Collective intelligence is still possible, but with great care so that I remain anonymous in my sharing of data.

Some of the folks around the VRM community are working on various implementations of this kind of ideas, myself included (http://grokya.org).

Still, I will keep a very close eye on threads like this. If people don't mind to live totally publicly then I want to know about it! :)

Hi Daniel, thanks for the comment.

Part of the reason for argument for transparency, as I understand it, is that information about us belongs to us. In order to ensure our ownership of this data, we need to set ourselves in charge of our identity online. If I understand Mr. Messina correctly, this why we need the tools DiSo are projects like it are seeking to provide.

As far as where to draw the line, I'm not sure yet; that's part of the experiment with this blog, asking the world where we should draw the line. Financial and health data as you suggest are both good candidates for remaining private in the original sense of the word. But with a "Citizen-Centric" web, everyone suddenly has to deal with some of the problems of celebrity. I'm curious how these things scale.

With regards to the hypothetical extreme-monitoring question, it makes a difference who has access to the data. If by 'anyone' you mean that the data would be freely available to anyone and everyone as under public domain or a creative commons type license, then maybe it would be worth the intrusion. That much data available to so many analysts could potentially benefit countless fields of research, and help mankind. Or, it could lay the groundwork for totalitarianism and open up new avenues of psychological manipulation by large corporations or corrupt governments. A similar scenario was explored by The Truman Show ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/ ), although in the movie, the subject was kept in the dark about the project.

It's a very interesting question. Would anyone ever willingly relinquish all privacy in every aspect of their lives? What difference does it make who has access to the information in such a scenario?

Hopefully our ability to be heard and our ability to keep our privacy are not mutually exclusive.

You are advocating for complete transparency, but where do you draw the line? Hopefully you draw one.

For example, financial and health info is very private to me.

What if someone developed technology that could, with the use of multiple types of sensors that track your every movement, build a digital mental model of yourself with such an accuracy that it could be considered your digital-self (including private thoughts, motivations, fears, desires, etc), would you want that data shared with anyone?

On the other hand, if that data was under your complete control, working for you and only you... Would you accept such a technology and allow it to continually monitor yourself?

These are not rhetorical questions. It would be great to hear your (and other people's) views on these questions.