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.

Apr

10

Its an Ideology, Stupid

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Like the KISS principle, the obvious sometimes evades me entirely until some kindly soul points it out. So it was out on the road this morning, listening to a BBC Radio documentary about start-ups while waiting in line for my share of the privilege of using Britain’s highways, that the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, the world of the Network is indeed an Ideology. While it is not nearly as advanced as the Church of England or the Communist Party once were, it is still more all-embracing than the insipid political parties of the day in Europe and the US. Think for a moment. What do you really believe in? The inalienable right of Old Etonians to rule England? Or your ability, through a protocol you and I barely understand, to use a tiny device to reach and speak to anyone in the world. The ability of a Bush or a Clinton to hold a post-imperial power together? Or the ability to find and check any information anywhere? Will the EU save us, or Open Access? What is more important to the future of Mankind – the UN or the W3C?

We can take this to extremes, of course, but just at the moment I would judge that if you threatened Europeans and Americans with loss of network access, even to a service like Twitter, as happened two weeks ago in Turkey, then the great and the good would simply refuse the command, find alternate access points, use satellite internet, and find every possible way of remaining in contact – as so many middle class Turks did, until it was obvious even to their government that this would not work. And this goes even more to the point for business access: arguably there is no going back from immediate communication for anyone making, buying or selling anything above the purely local level. And the great thing about the Connectivity faith is that, like previous religions, it subsumes everything that was there already. Some of the most passionate capitalism on view is displayed by network start-ups. Some of the most idealistic exponents of Open Access, Data and all other Opens, belong to sects that would make the Diggers and the Levellers look right wing. All human kind is here, subscribing to the basic rules of connection, mark-up, content organization and retrieval. This is probably the greatest number of people all subscribing to the same rulebook that planet Earth has ever seen.

Within the world of connectivity, dynamic networked new businesses will be built, and you do not need to be in Shoreditch or Silicon Valley or any other “cathedral zone” of the new order, to succeed. But we all need to recognize that the nature of business in the new order may well be different, so perhaps we now need to gather up some of the lessons, after 25 years of observation of how a networked society increasingly behaves, and see how we may apply them to what comes next. Here are some contributory thoughts in that direction:

* Many of tomorrow’s businesses will be smaller than their real world expiring counterparts, both in terms of revenues and staffing. This is partly because they are virtual, partly because we are paying small amounts for fractions of transactions in the network.
* Very many of today’s real world businesses will not survive the real world convergence with the network. Permanent job loss will scar many lives.
* Network trading will be very profitable, with smaller enterprizes realizing better margins than their real world counterparts. Increasingly network margins will stay in the network, and by the time we reach Bitcoin III the network will have moved from a microcosm of the real world into being the …real world.
* When the history is written, we shall note that by 2014 net citizens were already reading, per person, a great deal more than any previous human generation. This trend continues as more and more people realise that they need a far better basic education to survive in a networked world, and that those educational outcomes could be achieved very effectively by self-learning in the network.
* New levels of public and private trust will need to be created as more and more people “meet” for the first time online – and never meet in person. Close work colleagues may never physically meet. The signals given by voice and video will be closely examined as each of us strives to recognize “trustworthy” behaviour and indicate it to others. This will be part data analytics, part screen and keyboard performance analytics, and part, as now, pure hunch.
* Collaboration is the order of the day on the network. As individuals, as companies, we seek to get closer and help. This is because no one is vertically self-sufficient any more, and in a networked world that demands solutions we have to band together to create them. Knowing who your potential collaborators are becomes more important, for the first time since the Neolithic, than knowing who your competitors are.  As competition becomes more of a contest for public (aka user) trust and attention, and less a struggle for product and pricing differentiation.
* There is no part of human life on the planet that, in an Internet of Things as well as concepts and ideas, is beyond the range of the networked world. The priesthood which emerges could pose a threat or expose an opportunity, but at present we seem to have opted to live in an “ungoverned” network world. Certainly we will want to avoid any nation “controlling” the network , but there will be increasing clashes with nation states, both the most sophisticated and the most primitive, as their proponents seek to restore nineteenth century notions of rule and control. Only the mass can resist this, and only by acting as a mass.

The triumph of the network is not inevitable – and yet there seems at present no counter force. And already we have icons – all hail, Steve Jobs – and soon, no doubt, we shall have that priesthood mentioned above. I think I shall apply for a minor archimandrite-ship, or even a role as a Hermit!

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