John GREAT STUFF…Wow!!! I have been working on developing technology to bring about the decentralized internet for over 20 years. Recently pre IIW I and a team of developers have had some major breakthroughs that will being into reality many of the ideas that you mentioned.
We actually have working code so it is beyond theory
All Thanks To You
William
On May 22, 2014 at 1:29:12 PM, John S James (
">
) wrote: Something is wrong. In products like material goods, computers and data lead to much greater customization. But in the etherial area of legal rights, it's still contracts of adhesion, one size fits all. Why are products customized when computers make that possible, but legal contracts not?
I took a fresh look by asking what do I personally want from VRM -- and how could marketers benefit? Most fundamentally, the infrastructure needs a more flexible way to share authority among different parties.
To start with the most basic: I just moved, and have a lot of postal addresses to update. I would rather have a server (or for most people, a service) under my control, that could BE my public personal identity and address -- or let me change a physical mailing address in one place, and set the permission for giving it out (e.g. to anyone -- or to a list of named correspondents only). Using my personal identity server or service would be voluntary, but there would be an incentive to do so, since my contact information would always be the most current possible.
If I wanted to keep my physical address confidential, I could do that too, and my service would forward postal and electronic correspondence. Of course the sovereign government can grab anything; but a violent ex or a criminal gang hopefully could not get one's physical address.
Another handy service of a personal identity would be a way to follow what your associates or others are doing in social media or otherwise online, all in one place. Of course you could only follow information that you already had authority to receive, such as status updates by your Facebook friends. This service would show you engagement opportunities that you already had, as they happened, without having to search for them frequently in various different places. (An existing service like Nimble might be integrated into one's personal identity.)
Working on the above as part of a community empowerment platform…..We have the basic architecture finished and will be rolling parts of the service out shortly.
On Sharing Authority
Could I have multiple such identities? Yes. However, there would be various "badges" (certifications) given by different certifying organizations (including the government) to certify that an identity met its requirements. It would be my option whether to apply for and display any particular certification -- but the certifications themselves would be owned by and under the control of the organizations issuing them. The government would undoubtedly issue a certification that required uniqueness and accuracy in identifying a particular person to the government (like the "real ID" philosophy) -- and any party could use that certification to help decide whether or not to send certain correspondence to that identity.
And back to change of address, it would be handy to change your contact information in one place and have that take care of all government business, from tax authorities etc. (as well as non-government entities that chose to use it.) This infrastructure makes that possible.
Ads and Marketing
So the owner of an identity might say, "No ads at all here" -- and enforce it by bouncing all messages from any organization not certified (by some organization in the certifying business) to be ad-free. A company that gets itself certified and then violates the terms could lose its certification and have its future messages bounced, creating an incentive to behave.
So what's in it for marketers? Well, if I as end user could control the ads, even to the extent of shutting them all off, I personally and I believe many others would like to get some targeted ads, which could be tens or hundreds of times more likely to generate a sale than poorly targeted ads today. For example, I like seeing Amazon's book etc. recommendations based on what I bought in the past; I do buy books recommended, and whether I buy them or not the recommendations help me keep up with what's going on re my interests. So I'd be happy to let Amazon in. And for companies I might not know, I would be happy to fill out and maintain an advertising profile showing what ads I wanted -- e.g. cheap flights to San Francisco in certain date ranges -- or local tickets to any of a few dozen performers -- or other artists like them artistically (Pandora style), and/or like them in appealing to a similar audience (Amazon style).
And a nice way to keep advertisers from abusing this system and sending too many not-well-targeted ads would be to let the owner of the personal identity charge whatever amount to receive an ad at that identity. This would also share some of the revenue from big data back with the person whose data it is. For example, I might charge 10 cents an ad, maybe 25 cents -- or maybe a percentage of the advertised price, such as 0.05% of the price of a big-ticket item like a car. Markets would develop, in that someone charging too much would get no ads and no revenue. And someone who asked for lots of ads just to get the revenue would stop getting ads, after being able to get less and less for them as the ads directed there were not profitable.
Some conflict is inherent and cannot be made to go away. I see lots of fights over the certifications, what they should certify and whether someone had met the terms or not. Markets will happen here, too -- since except for the sovereign government's certification, the rest are given by private organizations and not locked in by law. If a certification is too strict or not strict enough, then persons on at least one end of the relationships won't use it, and will drift to others that do a better job. Or the commerce that the certification was supposed to regulate (and thereby facilitate) won' take place.
Is this approach to VRM worth developing?
John S. James
|