I just posted a blog entry on my personal site entitled Distributed Social Networking requires Secure Online Identity that discusses, among other things, the new "anti-Facebook" Diaspora* and the need for a solid foundation built upon secure, distributed, user-centric digital identity. There's another, less technical piece of the puzzle.
The current Facebook fiaso adds chilling clarity to the obvious conclusion that we can and should own our personal information. Ultimately, legislation may be needed that brings outdated laws that treat e.g. physical letters different than email (the former requires a warrent to obtain while the latter doesn't) and that consider our online persona completely separate of our physical persona, despite the fact that the data aggregators sell your online persona as the real "you" to their advertising and marketing clients.
What the general public still appears to fail to understand is that every credit card transaction, phone call, contest entered, social network joined, shopping club card used, etc. adds data to your growing personal profile that is collected and shared with data aggregators for the purpose of better targeting you with ads, direct mail, and other opportunities to spend money. For the average person reading this blog, somewhere between $500 and $5,000 a year changes hands between these data aggregators and their clients. This is money you don't see, but which the advertising and marketing communities use to market to you and others like you.
What the large data repositories don't yet understand (and this may yet be another decade away) is that "owning" other people's personal data is a liability. Some of the problems include:
- The data needs to be kept up-to-date, and profile aggregators such as Amazon spend millions each year on cleansing their databases.
- Incorrect or libelous data that may exist in the data store could lead to legal actions.
- The sharing of personal data or the leaking of it via unauthorized access in ways that don't meet the legal agreements between you and your Service Provider could also lead to legal actions.
Bottom line: If you wants services that depend upon knowledge about you, there is no better source for that than from (guess who?) you!
As an example, while Amazon's personalized "wish list" is capable of providing targeted suggestions, imagine how much better it could be if given access to your magazine subscriptions, books bought from other sources, favorite movies, favorite sites on the web, and more. Ideally (as was OpenPrivacy's goal) this could all be done - through cryptographic means - without divulging your True Identity, such as Name, Email, Address, etc.
This is the future we're looking for, and we'd like you to join us.