Jun
7
VZBV is out to get you!
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, privacy, Search, social media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments
However, I bet the US government gets you first! As the newspapers (Guardian 07/06/13) reproduce slides for training US security and FBI officials in the use of the data feeds they get from Google, Verizon, AOL, Apple, Facebook et al who under the FAA enactment can now download usage data and user content, the German Federation of Consumer Organizations (VZBV) brought an action against Apple – and won in the Regional Court of Berlin. One of Apple’s crimes was sharing data with subsidiaries, and another was re-using data not directly gathered in the trading activity (for instance, the recipient’s details on a gift certificate sale). If I worked in Apple’s legal department, dedicated to taking no prisoners in any legal wrangle, I would be getting fairly schizoid by now. As indeed I am, whenever I use terms like Open Access, Open Data, Open Society, Open Sesame… and then reflect on the attempt by everyone in the networked society and the network economy to suborn and subvert every data instance into own-able IP.
And now, a word of explanation. My silence here in the last 10 days reflects my listening elsewhere. And speaking – to two Future of Publishing sessions, in London and New York, sponsored by IXXUS (www.Ixxus.com), and at a seminar organized by the University of Southampton’s Web Sciences Doctoral students group (slides are available here). At each of these sessions we discussed the networked society and its implications. And Big Data reared its ugly head, strengthening my resolution never to mention the apparently undefinable term again, but to talk instead of massive data components and the strengthening business of data analytics. But nowhere did we discuss data protection – or revelation – and I regret that, especially now that the brilliant latest issue of DataIQ, the journal of DQM Group (www.dqmgroup.com) has come to hand. On page after page it nails the issues that every data holder should have in mind, and which our networked content industry grievously neglects at its peril. If the FBI don’t get you, the German courts will!
But I am less surprized, on reflection, by the US revelations than I thought I would be, bearing in mind the huge amounts of high level analytics and search software that agencies of the US government have bought over the years. On the one hand we should be grateful that a degree of paranoia has spawned an industry. This is where Seisint (Lexis Risk) came from, here is where Palantir and other software developers have flourished. These software developments were always intended for more than calculating the Presidential expenses or searching the library. The Military/Intelligence complex has been a rich patron for developing many of the tools that the networked society depends upon. On the other side we should reflect that mass observation on this scale is the Orwellian manifestation of a police state, and that those who battle for the liberty of the individual are betrayed if it becomes necessary to infringe that liberty in the cause of protecting it. In saying this, I should also say that I am sure that the UK government would be equally intrusive if they could afford it, and in times like these the natural tendencies of governments to use National Security as the cloak for the erosion of civil liberties is global. But after the emergency, do you ever remember government giving privacy rights back?
Which brings me to the network protection of user data in non-security contexts. Here there can be no doubt about who owns what: the problem is getting people to admit to the obvious. Thus, it seems to me axiomatic that when I use a networked service, then the transactional data that I input remains mine, unless or until I have accepted conditions of service that say otherwise. And even those conditions cannot rob me of my ownership: all they can do is define agreed conditions or re-use for the people I am dealing with at the time. Eventually, in the network, we will each of us be able to isolate every data entry that we make anywhere and store it in a personal DropBox in the Cloud. We will then sell or gift rights of re-use to designated parts to Apple, to market researchers, to the US government as part of a visa waiver application. But we shall at least be in control, and have pushed back on the arrogance of data players who seem to believe that every sign-on is their property. It is this type on “unthinking”, I am sure, that lies behind Bloomberg’s huge intrusion into user rights when they allowed their news team to examine the access records of their clients. I know we do not like Bankers in our society now (Don’t worry, Doctors and Lawyers and Journalists and Politicians – we shall be back for you again just as soon as we have finished off these financiers), but surely no one at Goldman Sachs deserves a call from a news reporter saying “I see you have not used your terminal this week, so are you still employed?”
Here in Europe we pride ourselves on ordering things differently. Our secret weapon is Germany, where, for fairly obvious historical reasons, privacy is now a fetish and data protection has become a goal pursued on behalf of citizens by a lobby of what can only be described as, well, privacy fundamentalists. The current revision of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) into European law will effectively turn the current opt-out regime in the EU into an opt-in world. Not necessarily a bad thing, says Mark Roy, CEO of the Data Agency in an article in DataIQ. I agree, and I also agree that the right of erasure (the right to be forgotten) is pretty difficult to manage. But the real horror story is the bureaucracy, the checking, the courts and the fines that all of this entails. Somewhere here there has to be a balance between German fanaticism and US laissez faire regarding the rights of individuals to the ownership of their own information. We have never seemed further apart from creating this essential building block of a networked society.
May
19
How Old is Innovation before it’s New…?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Living in a society that seems to value “innovation” above all things it is sometimes easy to forget that innovations sometimes have to wait and fester on the sidelines for many years before we recognize how new they really are, that the most common cause of innovation-failure is being before one’s times, and that some innovations never really perform until other innovations are available to make them fully useful. As a law publisher 30 years ago, we managers were deeply concerned with the quality of our thesaurus and how we could effectively use the major law dictionaries of the day; in 1983 I can recall discussions with West Publishing, as it was then, and the depressing conclusion that Blacks, the prevalent power in the marketplace, would never make it online. Now all the dictionaries and thesauri are online and we refer to them no more, but my other memory of those days of roaming the US as if it was a larder of innovation is going on to Denver to meet a guy who was compiling standardized word lists, which he called taxonomies, and inviting information companies to embed them online. He was a former camera shop manager and he knew from experience how many words could be used at retail to describe the same thing, or facets of the same thing.
This is in my head this evening since a note from a very bright and lively innovatory service player in Vienna, the Semantic Web Company, reminds me that they are a member of Wand Within (http://www.poolparty.biz/poolparty-becomes-partner-of-wand-within-program/), and refers me back to Ross Leher, the founder of Wand and my host on that visit in the mid-80s. I have written about Wand many times since, but it has never struck me more forcibly that it is the semantic web movement that releases the power of taxonomy by placing it in the context of technologies that enable us to be really creative in service innovations around it. The wonder to me is that Ross, his son, and their smart company, have been able to survive the 30 years it has taken for the world to get to where they were. I can well remember sending directory companies to them, but the sort of places where I was recommending them as a cure were dying of market forces anyway. The sort of things that Ross was preaching were endemic to the information culture in Denver and its environs anyway: this is light engineering and aircraft building country, and its largest information services player, IHS Inc (Information Handling Services), was created from the needs of customers with big “parts” lists, a multiplicity of standards to obey and scores of component suppliers.
Wand Within’s members are a guide to the aristocracy of semantic web service suppliers. TEMIS, the important French data analytics player, has often been referenced here as I wrote a White Paper with them on Collaboration earlier this year. DataFacet is Wand’s own toolset. Pingar, the New Zealand semantic search company has also been covered here. But it is also worth taking careful note of the Semantic Web Company and its PoolParty tools. (http://blog.semantic-web.at/2013/05/07/17-video-tutorials-are-available-now-learn-how-to-use-poolparty-step-by-step/). Here is another European source of advanced service development tools which should be critically important to publishers and service providers in the coming year. And attentive readers (both of you) will have noted regular reference here to a project called Jurion being developed by Wolters Kluwer Germany which represents, for me, one of the most complete visions of a semantic web-driven project yet available to us anywhere. The Semantic Web Company were their partners in this venture
(http://www.wolterskluwer.de/ueber-uns/presse/pressemitteilungen/aktuelle-pressemit-einzeln/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1309&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10365&cHash=af81776d45e924a85dc9ff273c2b40f6) and both of them may one day be persuaded to translate their press release into English!
So if we look for innovation, let us look for the new, and also for older services which the new play back on side. And let us recognize that innovation can be the re-integration of historic practice in a new context as well as discovery or invention. And, of course, invention never comes entirely from the ether. In just the sense used by Newton, the early fathers of thesauri are the information scientists upon whose shoulders we are now standing.
And one brief moment more, and a little more old law publishing. Thoughts of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna nourished the idea that if it was no accident that taxonomies came out of Denver, then innovation in a world of concepts would be natural in the great city of Freud and Wittgenstein. Which recalled visits in the 1980s to that city to see Tony Hilscher and Franz Stein of Manz Verlag (now 40% owned by Wolters Kluwer) and the wonderful aroma of coffee and cakes from Demel’s coffee house in the same street. And their company history reminds us of how intimately intellectual and commercial life can be linked to common ends:
“In 1912 the famous architect and critic of architecture Adolf Loos designed the main entrance to the bookstore, situated at Kohlmarkt 16 in Vienna’s First District. This entry has been preserved in its original state to the present day. Following Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis, its most significant feature, a recessed entryway combined with indirect lighting, was to exercise a subconscious attraction on passersby, pulling them magically inside to browse.”
This is the 201st issue of this blog: thank you for your patience.
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