Jun
4
Identity is the New Money
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Everyone in my world knows that I am as old as Methuselah, except Waitrose . As I pass around the store zapping the barcode on my groceries , I know that the wine and beer , when I reach the pay station , will trigger a call for a human staff member to visually categorize my grey beard as ” licensed to drink alcohol ” . This petulant annoyance at a petty delay resurfaced in my mind while reading Dave Birch’s excellent new book , ” Identity is the New Money ” ( London Publishing Partnership ” Perspectives ” series , 2014 ISBN 978-1-907994-12-8 ) . This should be in the travel bag of every information marketplace manager this summer . It is the very best restatement I have seen of the arguments supporting the idea that the credit card is about to diminish in influence , and that as soon as it has been replaced by identity resting upon the smartphone mobile wallet , cash will rapidly follow it too . And that mobile wallet , an API generating activity , not an app , is fundamentally about our identity management and the way we express our identity . Birch’s thesis now has real credibility , and he is able to illustrate it with case studies from around the globe . His new world bears no resemblance to the things that he used to talk learnedly to me about 20 years ago . Then we speculated ( or he speculated and I listened !) about Mondex and its ilk . A whole generation of software never flowered – until the Smartphone , key change agent here as elsewhere , came along .
The classic of them all is now M-PESA , the cash-and-cardless system which has been so successful in Kenya . Run by the mobile phone operator Safaricom ( part owned by Vodaphone who are also the operators elsewhere in East Africa ) this has become the lifeline money transfer system for much of the region , a way of creating country-city transfers that branch banking could not effectively accomplish , and a way of establishing identity , and with it trust , where it was difficult , outside of village society , to establish it before . But , as Dave Birch makes clear , there will be losers as well as winners . The Mobile Wallet could well take banking out of payments – leaving banks simply as a part of the lending cycle ( and not the most lively there , either , if his comments on Zopa and its rivals are borne out in time) . And then what happens to credit rating in the transactional data slipstream of mobile wallet transactions . Our record will , so to speak , speak for itself . I have argued for a long time that the “big” data risk to credit rating is much greater than the opportunity – it exposes the low value-add of much of the current marketplace – but here I can see a real possibility that rating could become a mobile wallet application very easily indeed . He finds much to admire in PayPal’s increasing incursions into physical commerce , and joyfully lays into the idea that Bitcoin is the answer because of its anonymity . Indeed , like cash it has a degree of anonymity , but this comes about because the log of exchange only indicates ownership to an encrypted key . Anyway , cash seems to me more corrupt than not ( though I had to smile at his stories of adult services vendors in the US using Amazon gift cards as currency with complete anonymity – what a brave investigator this man is !) His insight however on the future of cash is surely sound – we will replace it with thousands of exchangeable objects that are useful or desirable to each individual : ” Here in London we already have the Brixton e-pound . The Local Exchange Trading Systems ( LETS) from physical communities and the platinum pieces and Facebook credits from virtual communities will surge and merge , forming a panoply of private currencies that will make trade more efficient . Why save dollars for your retirement when you can save kilowatt-hours or calories ?”
Even a selective and space – constrained discussion of the book demonstrates that there is much here for anyone who aspires to trade on the network – even if you are trading data or information . What is harder to convey is that this short book is densely packed with argument ; written , praise be , in English of a straightforward and intelligible sort ; has every technical concept explained , and has a breezy and enjoyable good humour that typifies the author himself . Small wonder that he is one of our most revered Telco and payment systems consultants . I can also add that when cash and the credit card follow the cheque into the network twilight , we shall not be publishing books like this at all, and it is no surprize to see how much of this came from Dave’s blog ( http://tomorrowstransactions.com ). And now I have to go – the car is on a parking meter and , having already used the parking app ( universal now in a London where meters are diminishing – since no one has cash enough) to increase my time allowance remotely I have now exhausted that allowance as well as my readers .
Apr
16
Trust, Privacy and the Good Web Life
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, mobile content, news media, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
When J P Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce, speaks, as he did last year at the Outsell Signature Event, he often alludes to his childhood in a small Bengal village. When he went to the shop for cigarettes for his father or groceries needed by his mother, these were handed over to a child on trust, and with the justified expectation that payment would be made by an adult in due course. I had similar experiences in a Gloucestershire farming village, which demonstrates to me that trust and privacy form part of the lattice-work which underpins a society in which it feels good to exist, and in which there is a balanced view between everyone knowing enough about everyone in order to live at peace with them and trust them, and not knowing those things which are unnecessary to such trust and regarded as private by the individuals concerned.
We lost that balance in civil, real society in most western democracies in the second half of the twentieth century, so it is a bit surprizing that one of the most widespread criticisms of the virtual world of the networks is that these features are not in place. Yet the frequency with which both Trust and Privacy occur on conference agendas and in newspaper and blogosphere commentary reminds me all the time that we talk a great deal about the loss of these things, but do very little about them, even to the point of not consistently monitoring what is going on. And I was fascinated to hear, at a recent conference of librarians and academic researchers, one distinguished critic of publishing businesses point out that aggregators and publishers are now creating new and valuable information about the patterns of usage, the contexts in which certain types of usage take place, and the preferences of users where content was available unwrapped from its original – all of this great information was private to publishers and was not available to authors. And that the paradox here was the levels of sometimes unjustified trust given to academic peer review (he cited the Tamiflu case, of course) where those being trusted were denied full sight of the evidential data, in a milieu where peer reviewers are not required to even try to replicate the results achieved by the experiment which they are concerned to referee.
And these comments were made about science and medicine, areas where public trust must be blind because it cannot be fully informed. The other area where this same consideration applies is in security, the flipside of Trust. When we are told that something is “secure” in the network, few of us have the ability to make a judgement. Thus, until last week, few of us had doubts about SSL – until Heartbleed broke. I have been reading about this in a new online newssheet called Cyber Security Intelligence (info@cybersecurity-intelligence.com), founded by my friends Alfred Rolington and Tim Heath. And I take it that the success of this venture – I have certainly become an avid reader – is about the fact that Trust is now front and centre of our concerns on the network, and so Security, whether it is the Snowden leaks or security being compromised at our bank, becomes critical to all of us.
In these difficult circumstances we will probably behave as we usually behave. We will ignore warnings (who changed passwords because of Heartbleed?) and only seek control of the Trust question by increasing security close to us when it is easy to do so, and enhances our Privacy at the same time. To an extent, everything we do in the network is competitive. I must have better Security and enhanced Privacy because I need it/deserve it/can pay for it. You do not need it, since I need to evaluate you as credit risk/market research you as a target/use you as part of my data analytics sweep. In order, then, to even think about the question of balance with which I began this piece, we need to be able to decide, each for himself, our own settings in terms of Trust (Security) and Privacy.
The systems to help us do this are now becoming available, just as more and more of our personal information becomes network available/vulnerable. Users of the new Galaxy S5 smartphone, just launched by Samsung, may or may not be keen on its built-in personal heart rate monitor being available to insurers or employers. So the market at last seems interesting for services like Paogo (info@paogo.com), long in the wings (2008), or new developments like the French/American Tego (http://www.tegobox.com), in beta now for launch later this year. Here is something of what Tego says it will deliver:
“Simple
Simply tag a file and it will be encrypted and kept safe. Control what others can see and for how long.
Clear
No central server collecting your data, no tracking. Data never leaves your devices. Surf completely anonymously.
Personal
Build different personal environments with trusted contacts. Then share without risk”
Tego (“I protect” in Latin) will secure you against market analysts and hackers and your own government – but what about that issue of balance? When everything is all locked up we still won’t have the levels of Trust of JP’s Bengali village. Maybe I am looking for something completely different. Is anyone out there building a Trust machine, which does data analytics on your avatar, on your writing, on your facial expressions on Skype, and compare them with Trust models, so I really know whether to trust anyone out there ? And whether I am rated Trustworthy? I doubt it, since it would undermine elective politics completely, but if the answer to the machine is in the machine, as my dear friend Charles Clark was wont to say, then we should start now to engineer the network to find us that vital point of balance between Trust and Privacy.
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