Re: [projectvrm] Definition of Digital Privacy

[Guy Higgins < >]

+1

From: Devon M T Loffreto < "> >
Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 7:59
To: Doc Searls < "> >
Cc: Julian Ranger < "> >, Kevin Cox < "> >, ProjectVRM list < "> >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Definition of Digital Privacy

I agree.

It may sound like one or other type thinking, but there is definite nuance.

I myself am building solutions that do not lead with personal Sovereignty... how can they... socially, there is barely enough awareness for "privacy" pundits, let alone actual leverage construction that is personal in origin.

That said... I am working on, and will embed "Sovereignty" as a data structure... in my case led by the definition I have put forth of "parent Sovereignty" within educational context.

From developer standpoint... I dont build/market to "privacy" though... thats the rathole where false assurances will be constructed and required by political-facing Institutional efforts.

Thats the safe perspective... every rule has an exception... but why waste time thinking some connected entity is going to preserve your privacy? Until when?

The more important fight revolves around Human-centric systems versus the automated AI that is dominating imaginations, investment cycles, bureaucratic notions of administrative empowerment, etc.

Non-participation might be the root of VRM... its a force of nature that has a personal origin of authority and has been used to bring empires to their knees before. It would be nice if we could cooperate our way to an advanced sense of personal empowerment in Society... but while we hope for best, Id be prepared for worst. 

VRM must have value at scale of You/1... with a network effect.

If you can not build that and fund that you can not achieve VRM.

Non-participation is a very nimble concept and it does not mean non-presence, non-active... its not anti-vaxxer in nature, does not fall victim to conspiracy thinking and is immune to marketing bs.

Its not for everyone. Neither is VRM.

Devon

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

This is a tough one.

While I say +1 to all you say here — personal sovereignty matters fundamentally — I also see work being done by VRM developers that doesn’t start with sovereignty but is also not frog boiling. 

Rather than insist that all developers start with personal sovereignty, I’d rather encourage developers who care about personal sovereignty to step in. We need them.

Doc

On Feb 25, 2015, at 1:05 PM, Devon M T Loffreto < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Simple messages and simple steps to me means we need not fight the major Sovereignty issue as step 1, but make something simple for consumers today which gives them a better experience then they otherwise have – then they will come.

If I am building a consumer/customer-facing business I think you are on the money with this.

If I am concerned that building incremental tolerance in a populace means the long term degradation of sensitivity to the underlying cause of Institutional capture, and the lack of people-based mechanisms to generate change for themselves, then I say "frogs in a boiling pot".

The business of delivering "privacy" respecting tools and the structural impetus for building Human-centric systems as we head into this automated age of administrative intelligence might not have anything to do with one another. 

Declaring yourself in anyway meaningful, starts with self-possession and extends through a social respect of self-possession. The degradation of both prevents many important outcomes... and as we all likely experience and witness for ourselves, people are all too willing to make poor choices when convenience and easy-living are at stake, or under threat of __________ (enter any fear).

The notion of Sovereignty that gets bantered about in these conversations is a line in the sand. You either care about it or you dont. In either case, its not a marketing slogan/campaign... its the line where fact meets bullshit. As a Nation, as regional contingencies, as parents, as Individuals... structure yields results... and when companies sell you a service you should be able to evaluate it in actual terms... not marketing hyperbole. When the State of the Union is on TV, you should know what kind of country you are part of and where the authority originates and resolves for all these "decisions" we make in Union.

The conflict for all of us, presumably here because we care about the integrity of people-centered interactions, whether in business transactions, health care, government, education, etc... is to weigh our short-term business development decisions against our long term Society development influences. Customers who consciously empower these paths should no longer allow themselves to structurally function as "customers"... they are market-defining and influencing entities... self-possession matters and contains leverage... but only after a structural shift in personal Terms.

No one can tell you what is right or wrong until the outcomes of your actions are in motion. Then we can all evaluate for ourselves, and negotiate the social implications of living beside Facebook engineers and NSA W2's that are functionally impressive, if not intrinsically problematic - all for a paycheck.

Devon 

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:49 AM, Julian Ranger < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Thanks for the various response to my attempted definition.  As you probably know my business, digi.me, is very consumer facing today (we’ve over 250K users and growing) and there is a need to get any language we use very simple to get the message across to the “average consumer”.  I am of Kevin’s opinion below that to effect change we have to start small and grow from there, thinking about the process – yes, we have a grand vision ahead, but its baby steps to get there.  Simple messages and simple steps to me means we need not fight the major Sovereignty issue as step 1, but make something simple for consumers today which gives them a better experience then they otherwise have – then they will come.  To that end we’re just trying to say that privacy doesn’t mean not sharing, it means being in control of sharing. Then our simple app can move towards sharing, which the user controls, whilst still being about privacy.

 

I would add that it also means we don’t have to fight big business, the advertising systems et al, but instead we can co-opt them bit by bit.  By showing that going to the individual gives businesses access to richer data than they can otherwise get from the more privacy invading methods used today, businesses get to see they can be more engaging for their users and hence can achieve better results.  Again this means we have to define privacy as including sharing.

 

Jules

 

From: Devon M T Loffreto [mailto: " target="_blank"> ]
Sent: 23 February 2015 18:25
To: Kevin Cox
Cc: Julian Ranger; ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Definition of Digital Privacy

 

Ecosystem analogies are abundant and perhaps inspiring, but its important to take note of our present configuration, which is all industrial design. The "tree of cooperation" has been aspired to by many, and for a long time. Tools and leverage get jobs done, and in this case must create value at the scale of you/1 across a network.

 

John is right... the privacy debate is a rathole. But, there are clear winners from that reality.

 

Non-participation is a tool of privacy. It is also prescriptive when seeking to change operational injustice.

 

Human fortitude is variable.

 

Devon

 

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Kevin Cox < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Devon,

 

Your analogies 

 

"A bridge can not be built until it has a solid foundation.... the structure of the foundation is critical" and "VRM runs into the cart ahead of the horse problem" 

 

Could be changed to 

 

"Trees grow from small beginnings"  and "VRM systems grow by evolving new branches on the tree of cooperation"

 

If we think of VRM development as genetic engineering rather than civil engineering then we concentrate on the process rather than the overall final design.  With genetic engineering we don't know what will be the result of our tinkering but if it works the way we want we propagate it.   We want privacy and personal sovereignty and if our VRM plants do not achieve those results we should kill them off.  

 

We are unlikely to be successful if we design our VRM systems using existing structures as the blueprints.

 

Changing the analogy will change the process.

 

Kevin

 

 

 

 

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 2:44 AM, Devon M T Loffreto < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Privacy is privilege as deployed. People are "asking" for it. Legislation is debating whether it should be given/accommodated under certain constraints. 

 

Conversely, personal Sovereignty exists prior to permissioning or the granting of privileges. It does not ask...it declares, with force when necessary. This is the source of National Sovereign integrity in America. A nation such as America could not exist, and will not continue to exist, without it. The current mis-education of America capitalizes on fear to administer outcomes that are not going to hold water for long.

 

The "privacy is dead" line is accurate in so much as personal Sovereignty is dead too. National Sovereignty via administrative capture/enslavement vanquishes it in observational terms. That said, it is restorable...  no matter how tarnished. But people have to fight for it in the manner they are always required to. 

 

Employees (customers of work) are not going to do that for anyone. They have priorities that undercut the nature of authority required to stand personal Sovereign Rights up. No mercenary force can ever compete with people who fight for personal blood Sovereignty.

 

Personally Sovereign data authority requires pre-administrative integrity, at the point of identity origination. Without that, privacy is a privilege and a belief akin to Santa Claus. Sure, it shows up on schedule... until it doesn't, then you realize it is lie propagated by the adults in the room with the self-assumed privilege to construct such an illusion.

 

VRM runs into the cart ahead of the horse problem... customers of anything... services, Rights, products, etc... do not create capability, they empower it with the aggregate choices of the group based on demand-driven values.

 

Changing the structure of empowerment in the market to one that is VRM in flow requires a re-structuring of participatory roles. The default condition can not be customer... it goes no where.

 

A bridge can not be built until it has a solid foundation... the structure of the foundation is critical.

 

Devon

 

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 5:01 AM, Julian Ranger < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

A lot of Personal Data and VRM discussions veer into discussing  Privacy, but to do so in a meaningful sense I think we need to define what it is in the digital domain.

 

We seem to be caught between two stools of thought on Privacy - either Privacy is dead (aka Mark Zuckerberg and more recent posts such as http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/02/11/privacy-is-following-chivalry-to-the-grave-heres-why-thats-a-good-thing/) or the Go Dark movement. To me this seems to be looking at issues incorrectly because we haven't defined what Privacy is.

 

Specifically , being private doesn’t mean not sharing anything - it means being in control of what you share, to whom and when. For example, I am a private person, but I share sex with my wife, I share family issues within my family group, I share my finances with my financial advisor, I am happy for my supermarket to know what I buy. The point is that in the physical world I am largely (but never completely) in control of my privacy and that includes what I share and with whom.

 

So privacy does NOT mean no sharing. This is important as sharing is the grease to the future economy - combining different data sets that I share will enable radically new services and experiences that I have yet to even think of.  Privacy equates to controlled sharing. There is a spectrum of sharing for data items: from items I keep solely to myself, to items I share with one or a few people and ask not to be shared further, to data I may share more widely and allow to be reshared, to data which I share with the world (either as me or in anonymised form).

 

I'd like to include "for what purpose" in the above definition of what privacy implies re control and to most people they would. If I disclose to a close friend a secret so I can get feedback for example, I do not expect that secret to be disclosed to others - it was only for the purpose of our conversation. However, I can't control my friend directly and he may tell others. In which case of course he has lost trust and I probably won't share with him again - or at least will share more carefully. This is of course the same in the digital world. If I share with you for a purpose and you use for another purpose then I am unlikely to want to share with you again.

 

So, I propose we define Digital Privacy as the "Ability to control your personal data, inc. who you share it with, when and for what purpose"

 

·       (Note: the dictionary defines Privacy as the "condition of being secret". In my digital privacy definition I propose this is equivalent to "being in control of who is in on the secret".)

 

Any other suggestions?

 

Thanks, Jules

 

 

Julian Ranger

Founder & Chairman, digi.me (formerly SocialSafe)

 

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