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


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Doc Searls < >
  • To: Jason Wong < >
  • Cc: James Felton Keith < >, jim pasquale < >, Adrian Gropper < >, Philip Sheldrake < >, John Philpin < >, ProjectVRM list < >, StJ Deakins < >
  • Subject: Re: [projectvrm] #PAC - Personal Data Action Committee
  • Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 10:39:15 -0500
It depends on what “valuable” means. If it’s only exchange value, transactional value, perhaps privacy means nothing. (And I think that may be where James is going here.) But if it’s what we wish for as individuals, or as societies, privacy has a lot of value, or we wouldn’t have invented clothing to cover our privates, or curtains and shades for our windows and doors, to create private spaces where we feel safe and comfortable, away from unwelcome observation or intrusion, both of which are now rampant on the Net.

The Internet didn’t come with privacy any more than nature did. We need to create technologies—the online equivalents of clothing and shelter—before we can clearly signal to others where our personal boundaries lie, and what’s okay and not okay for others to do in respect to our personal spaces, and our instantiations in the online world.

It should help to recognize that we’ve had thousands of years to make privacy work in the physical world, and there are plenty of technologies, social norms and laws that have arisen out of our common understandings of privacy. Meanwhile the Internet we know well today is barely much more than two decades old. In it we have barely begun to scaffold up the equivalents of what we enjoy in the offline world. We also aren’t helped by the simple fact that there is no space in the connected world. There, when connected, we are zero distance from each other, also at costs that round to zero.

Meanwhile large advantages have been taken, especially by the martech and adtech businesses, of our absent privacy protections. In tech what can be done will be done, until ways are found to stop it. And right now we are still in the first clause in that last sentence. The GDPR and ePrivacy are in the second one, and are still very early and primitive efforts. Also lacking are the tools of personal agency, both for protecting our private spaces and signaling others about what is and isn’t okay.

So we have a lot of work to do.

Doc

On Feb 22, 2018, at 10:20 AM, Jason Wong < " class=""> > wrote:

May you please show objective evidence of your hypothesis that "privacy is not a valuable thing".

May I suggest viewing the cryptocurrency markets.  The foundation of blockchain technology is privacy, agency, and peer to peer sharing of information (transactions).  The evidence is apparently that privacy is valuable.

Please explain your position with evidence.

Jason D. Wong, MD MPH MBA

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 10:00 AM, James Felton Keith < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
All, I've seen the word privacy a dozen times and wanted to address it.

Privacy: is not a valuable thing. 
Agency: is a valuable thing.
Permission: enforces and protects agency. 

We have laws that compel frameworks of protection, as it should be our new religion in this decentralized and individualistic world.

When I think about privacy, I think about the (un)nature that humans have. Human's simply endeavor to survive, we are hard wired to exist, unless we are ill or exhausted. Processes like apoptosis and our cellular make-up ensure that. In ancient times protection and security, we derived from access to each other not privacy. Permission is of course, always in play, but hierarchy (or politics) of decision making is also always in play. The point here is that humans must interact. We must be social and as a result political. It is the sole utility that we organisms distribute to each other, and a thing of utility is always a thing of value. We should care more about maximizing our utility to each other, not privacy, as it is not valuable. 

Because of the sheer size of the Law Industry, privacy has been exported from an institutional design discipline to something that encompasses individual interactions. Again, that is not a thing. Our only hope towards security, unity, community, economic opportunity, sanity, health, progressive existences, and the like, are transparency in identifying our identity while assigning agency (ownership) to that dynamic identity.  

Regarding VRM, vendors or product/services should be using methods like privacy-by-design to ensure that they are just transacting people's utility (value), and taking a fee to indemnify those problem solvers who came up with the supply-chain solution. First things first, people derive 100% of their value form each other. Vendors governments and other institutions can't build themselves to believe or think that their products/services are what's valuable or they're fundamentally flawed. 

We don't need to "educate" people about this. We just need to continue to enforce the notion that agency over one's identity a human rights issue. 

















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 Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 8:48 AM, jim pasquale < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
I too Doc think JFK pushing the personal data initiatives through politics, driving policy isn’t a bad thing. 



Let me be clear that I’ve been an advocate of personal agency for the duration. My involvement with Linux, free software, open source, Cluetrain, The Intention Economy, ProjectVRM… all of them, have been about getting tools into the hands of individuals, enlarging personal agency, and solving problems from the individual’s side—while 99.xx% of all other solutions remain top-down and centralized, expanding the reach of business, government and other institutions. I don’t believe any of those approaches are bad, just that they are too easily defaulted by available money, incumbency, and models that have been wearing ruts in roads for hundreds of years—and because approximately nothing is happening on the individual’s side, enormous leverage is to be had there, and we have a network underneath it all that enables personal agency like never before in the history of our species.

Yet I also believe we have to respect the role that policy can play. Thanks to the GDPR and ePrivacy, we have opportunities right now we haven’t ever had before. The whole business world is shaken up. This is good.

I’m on record pushing back against valuing data as a commodity. See For personal data, use value beats sale value, The absent market for personal data and How the personal data extraction industry ends. So I’m not in alignment with James’ "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.”

But I do like that James is running for office and wanting to address privacy and related issues with policy that our community, even with its divided opinions, can influence.

Doc


Agency may be the only thing. 

( I was censored by the DC Metro )

Adrian 

+1 Philip - Agency may be 

I salute James' robust response and motivations, but never the method. Culturally, it might suit the US until it doesn't.

I subscribe 100% to the heuristic of enhancing human agency ... it's the focus of my research.

And I celebrate difference re. "differentiable beings". Lennard Davis (2002) offers up a favorite quote of mine: "form follows dysfunction".

And Doc (2015): "We’re all human. We’re also all now on one worldwide network, and we need to keep that human too. Nothing is more human than our differences — not only from each other, but from our former selves, even from moment to moment and context to context. Likewise, nothing is more human than our ability to relate to one another in countless ways, all the time, even as we all grow and change. Our new networked world needs to respect that."

Any reading of Jaron Lanier responds appropriately (and conclusively?) to any proposal seeking to justify our human existence through its systematic quantification, so I won't attempt to regurgitate that here.

Do we really want to reduce this fantastical digital facility to a question of data ownership and market participation? Seriously, is that the best we can aspire to? Just as the rest of the world is catching up with this community, are we really happy to slide back to some dated 1980s paradigm just to see some 'progress' locked in?

Or should we assert that the human is now as informational and interfacial as she is biological and psychological? A question of identity and dignity and participation not market worth.

Shouldn't we raise questions of identity and collectivities and ethics rather than securitization and free (flawed) markets? Should we not strive to offer and derive unquantifiable value in all agencement of wonderful variety and purpose rather than construct a simplistic mechanic by which some one might package up the personal data equivalent of a collateralized debt obligation?

Best, Philip.


On 21 February 2018 at 19:06, Doc Searls < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:
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



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.


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.











--

Adrian Gropper MD

PROTECT YOUR FUTURE - RESTORE Health Privacy!
HELP us fight for the right to control personal health data.






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