Re: [projectvrm] Some possibly VRooMy stuff from the NYTimes R&D lab

[Don Marti < >]

begin Doc Searls quotation of Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 03:51:08PM -0400:
> 
> <http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/07/in-the-loop-designing-conversations-with-algorithms/>
> 
> Angles: market conversations and the Internet of Things.
> 
> Thoughts?

"Transparency" seems to be the first thing that
people come up with when they start thinking about
surveillance marketing.  Let's make the vendors be
"transparent" about what they're doing, and the users
can decide whether or not to participate.

But the problem with transparency is exactly that
it does require people to spend time thinking about
surveillance marketing.  This doesn't seem like a
problem to people who already spend time thinking
about surveillance marketing. It doesn't impose any
extra work on them.  But for normal people there are
only so many hours in the day, and little time to
think about some new business model.

In the best case -- secure, well-communicated
transparency -- privacy becomes limited not by the
user's technical skill, but by the cognitive load
on the user of understanding how he or she is being
tracked in more and more situations.

  Jonathan Levitt, at Advertising Age...
  "In-Store Cell Phone Tracking Pits Consumers Against
  Retailers"
  
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/store-cell-phone-tracking-pits-consumers-stores/292628/

  "Industry research shows that consumers overwhelmingly
  reject cell phone tracking. In a recent OpinionLab
  study of 1,042 consumers, 77.0% said that in-store
  cell phone tracking was unacceptable, and 81.0% said
  that they didn't trust retailers to keep their data
  private and secure."

So here's the VRM-ish part of all this.  Users are
already communicating about their privacy norms.
There are vacant niches for information technology
products and services to help the users enforce
these norms.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/