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Re: [projectvrm] #PAC - Personal Data Action Committee


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Doc Searls < >
  • To: jim pasquale < >
  • Cc: James Felton Keith < >, Philip Sheldrake < >, John Philpin < >, StJ Deakins < >, ProjectVRM list < >
  • Subject: Re: [projectvrm] #PAC - Personal Data Action Committee
  • Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:06:11 -0500
I salute what James is trying to do here. It may not align perfectly with what any one of us believes or wants, but it’s good energy in the right direction.

I also suggest this is a good topic for IIW: <http://iiworkshop.org> Who’s going? 

Doc

On Feb 21, 2018, at 1:19 PM, jim pasquale < " class=""> > wrote:

For the US brethren and others potential not embarrassed but interested check out this link:


Or 


JF there’s momentum here to leverage, see you on the 1st.

On Feb 21, 2018, at 9:12 AM, James Felton Keith < " class=""> > wrote:

To clarify, the US has no approach. That's why we're organizing to write the laws. It's the American way. I'm one of those Go America freaks. While, I'm not a fan of an email debate past 1999 and I'd rather not dig into the weeds that my last book could, I'll address the ideal that ownership can't facilitate a cooperative. 

I always like to say that individuals are at their best when they identify with a community, and communities are at their best when identifying all of their individuals. As our identities inevitably become something more quantifiable, ownership of the self that we legally have agency over will be at the core of crediting ourselves with participation in the increasingly interconnected community that we call our society/cities/states/etc. This is increasingly important as people "come out" as differentiable beings from their peers. Our individuality relative to the people around us and those adjacent to them, is propelling a need to at least define our diverse existence in order to allocate resources of sorts. Institutional Infrastructure: Big corporations, small corporations, governments, cooperatives will meet the supply that our identities demand and we should endeavor to ensure that they do so in a not only ethical way but also an equitable way. When thinking about marginalized populations of the world, I think it's most important to be able to know how every individual existed and influenced their community. 

I think that we agree that a cooperative is necessary, I just want to define how we distribute knowledge and incentives of participation about participants most granularly.  














James Felton Keith
Unity Community Opportunity
Engineer | Economist | Entrepreneur 

www.JamesFeltonKeith.com

Manhattan | The Bronx | Glocal

 


IMPORTANT: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential. They are intended for the named recipient(s) only. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to anyone or make copies thereof.

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 5:45 PM, Philip Sheldrake < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
Thanks John, and thanks for checking. I don't write anything here that I wouldn't write publicly or be happy to have attributed to me anywhere else.

And Doc, thanks for the clarifying question. It is indeed the "icky shit giant platforms do and the government does nothing about". Beyond that, I could never claim to be an expert on the US condition ... I find Brexit challenging enough to understand and that surrounds me! Effectively, it's all the stuff you have dedicated yourself to illuminating and fixing.




On 20 February 2018 at 21:32, Doc Searls < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
“The current US aporoach” is what?

I can guess it’s the icky shit giant platforms do and the government does nothing about (other than operating the world’s largest spy operation, which is another thing, but not entirely). But I’m not sure. Unpacking the statement a bit will help.

Doc


love this ...

"On a more upbeat note, I find the current US approach to personal data nothing short of abhorrent, and perhaps I should celebrate from afar any effort to transform it."

if you are ok with this …  it might appear somewhere more public … either anonymous attribution - or to you Philip - depending on your preference - and with your permission of course.




This isn't the response you're looking for James, but my view on all things personal data (per my previous contributions) is, I think, quite different to yours. In fact, accepting that we're in the same community based undoubtedly on some shared values, it seems we stand in quite different parts of the tent.

I have offered the polemic here that ownership is a red herring. And its securitization is wholly unlike any fabric of a co-operative and civilized society I recognise or wish to help build. This may in part be a European .v. US thing, if I was to fall back on shoddy stereotypes – shoddy because I'm sure there are people here who would immediately render that statement void. Or it could be that the tantalizing possibilities beyond the shoehorning of 21st Century challenges into 20th Century frameworks remain under-explored and under-celebrated.

On a more upbeat note, I find the current US approach to personal data nothing short of abhorrent, and perhaps I should celebrate from afar any effort to transform it. The caveat would have to be however that such an effort as you describe here be merely interim, absent any path dependencies that disallow for brighter possibilities down the road.

Regards, Philip.
London, UK.

On 19 February 2018 at 20:42, James Felton Keith < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
Everything. 
Every place that data is transacted, is an opportunity to index. And every index is an opportunity for securitization and risk management. 
I want data to look like the financial and capital markets. 

Folks, I've gotta go act like a Blue Suit for a few hours because my I'm running for office. So my responses from here will be delayed. 
Let's break the way capital works and piece together a more ethical and equitable global society.

















James Felton Keith
Unity Community Opportunity
Engineer | Economist | Entrepreneur 

www.JamesFeltonKeith.com

Manhattan | The Bronx | Glocal

 


IMPORTANT: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential. They are intended for the named recipient(s) only. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to anyone or make copies thereof.

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 3:20 PM, StJ Deakins < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
Hi James, 

A quick question if I may on this line:

"Our core work at #PersonalData is to index and establish a market of price.” 

What is that you’re trying to index and establish a ‘price’ for exactly? 

Thanks
StJ

-- 
StJ Deakins
@stjohndeakins

On 19 February 2018 at 20:12:27, James Felton Keith ( " target="_blank" class=""> ) wrote:

Sure. This is a life's worth of work but to your 3 questions:

1) The GDPR for instance establishes the "Right To Erasure? Which gives agency.
I want a right to ownership, and have peers lined up to litigate it based on erasure, and legislators (including myself if we win) to write new laws that state ownership. 

2) we can technologize ourselves into human rights. It has to be an agreement (a trust) between people. Security has to be incentivize through a culture, as it is not a tech. Security us also not a derivative of privacy. We need more tools to manage permissions and protection.

3) based on the right to be indemnified, from the incentive to participate a market will form. It already has been. There are more legal infrastructure that we need to write to define what's our individual contribution versus our group creations, and price will scale. 

Our core work at #PersonalData is to index and establish a market of price. 

BUT FIRST THINGS FIRST we must wear agency, permission, and ownership as our politics. We must add this issue to the political lexicon. Or the ignorant world will run amuck. 



-sent from my mobile-
JFK
Unity
Community
#OpportunityWeNeed


On Feb 19, 2018 2:50 PM, "Doc Searls" < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
I’m with you, but want to know more about particulars. Scroll down…


I'm just writing briefly to ask you all to get very political with your thoughts and work. We need to be writing all of the laws with regards to this data driven future.

If you are not familiar with my work, I'm primarily interested in the value of data and I think that we all need three things. 
  • More data proliferation
    • Industry by industry, function by function, operation by operation.
I assume this is so we can know more, but i want to be sure.

  • Total ownership to individuals 
    • of data about their Personhood or derived from their Personhood
How do we assert and secure that? 

I think we need code. Tools. Materials to build our castle walls, Archimedean levers to move the world.
  • Market structures for data that 
    • allocate value from productivity to those who contributed input
Measured how?

My concern here is that most data has use value and not sale value. I have many terabytes of data laying around in drives here on my desk and nearly all of it is useful only to me, and has no use value in the world.

Some of it conceivably has sale value, but that’s only to marketers who raid it constantly through spyware in my browsers and apps, plus what they can buy from Experian and Acxiom—and royally suck at what they do with what they find.

Today, for example, I got an email from Travelocity telling me this:

We’ve created a customized recommendation page based on your unique interests and the top searches from travelers just like you.

Top Destinations for David
Las Vegas
Las Vegas >>
Los Angeles
Los Angeles >>
See All My Picks >>

I’m not interested in Las Vegas, and I damn near live in Los Angeles. It’s more of an origin than a destination. If Travelocity knew anything, you’d think they’d know that. In my rare dealings with Travelocity, have I ever expressed an interest in any of those places.

“All My Picks,” by the way, are the above plus Phoenix and Orlando. I can name hundreds of places off the top of my head (or out of my very knowable public postings) that I’d want to visit before any of those: fjords in Greenland, Hebrides in Scotland, canyons in Utah, grasslands in Nebraska, islands in the Mississippi.

In other words, they know nothing, and they’re bad even at that. And they’re probably paying third parties for the nothing those parties have gained by spying on me.

Yesterday I also took the trouble of looking at what AdChoices said about ads that were targeted (or retargeted at me).

Based on “information collected about your online browsing behavior,” Google has sold Unilever on pitching me Baby Dove soap.

theTradeDesk,  thinks I’m interested in Saxenda (Liraglutide) injections for “some adults with excess weight (BMI above 27) who have weight-related medical problems or obesity (BMI above 30)…” 

In fact I am now down 15 lbs with a BMI under 25, thank you. This is something only my Withings scale and cryptographically isolated database in Withings cloud used to know—but not Withings, which is why I bought the thing. Withings’ privacy pitch was that only I would know my weight, even though that weight was recorded in their cloud.

Ah, but Withings is now owned by Nokia, which just sent me this:

Your Weekly Report
February 5–11
Time to step it up, David!
Don't be discouraged by last week's results. We believe in you!
AVERAGE WEIGHT
77.9 KG
-0.3 kg as compared to the previous week

I haven’t worn a watch in many years, and I don’t want Nokia to know what I weigh. But there we have an offer based on my “interests."

Oh, and then there is Acxiom, which also sells personal data, most of it from open databases. Acxiom lets you see some of what they think they know about you, at a site called AboutTheData.com. In the brief time I consulted them, I recommended they create this. They did years later, at the urgings of John Battelle, who became a board member. 

AboutTheData has a few things right about me: my birth date, gender, ethnicity, marital status and political party (none). It is off on the number of adults in my household, our number of children and their ages. It’s right that we own a home, that it’s a single family one, and on the rough outlines of the home’s dimensions. It is wrong on how long we’ve owned it, when we moved in, when we purchased it, what it is worth, and pretty much everything related to what we might owe on the home and how. It has nothing about our cars other than that we have car insurance. On Household Economic Data, it has pretty much everything wrong, other than the fact that we hold credit cards. It’s right that we have purchased the kind of stuff everybody has purchased, but wrong on how much we spend on any of it, how often. Finally, for interest categories, it says all this:


All of those I suppose are nothing but defaults: set to “Interested" unless the person finds this site and turns them off. (Which I have in the past, but I see they’re all on again, so why bother.) In other words, Acxiom provides these as open floodgates for marketers to spam me with shit in all those categories.

I provide these items as evidence that sharing our data with sellers of anything is likely to result in offers that are way off base—and that data by itself has no intrinsic value and plenty of flat-out-wrong extrinsic value. 

I also submit that that marketers wanting our data is not proof of that data’s sale value.

* productivity is a measure of input
* data is evidence of input

Not clear. Again, I can guess but I’d rather not.

We have a new opportunity before us to build scalable laws on top of regulations like the GDPR that provide agency to individuals over their data.

Laws are good. Code is better. Or at least better if it comes first.

We've built a PAC (political action committee) via the Int'l Personal Data Trade Association. 
It'd being structured right now. 

This is important work. For those interested in working the policy front, I highly encourage getting involved.

Thanks,

Doc












James Felton Keith
Unity Community Opportunity
Engineer | Economist | Entrepreneur 

www.JamesFeltonKeith.com

Manhattan | The Bronx | Glocal

 


IMPORTANT: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential. They are intended for the named recipient(s) only. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to anyone or make copies thereof.











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