Identity / Profiles / Trust

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then cutting someone else's work and pasting it on your own blog is downright adulation - this is a fascinating piece of analysis by Louis Gray, shows what is possible with crunching Social Network data.

The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out. (See: LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters)

Want the average age of an employee? A good estimate is on LinkedIn. Want to know if there is a high level of turnover, and people don't stay long? LinkedIn has that too. It also can provide hints as to whether a company is so strong that folks aren't leaving at all, or if they are leaving in exodus. And if you peer closely enough, you can see the Silicon Valley carousel, as employees move from company to company in search for the next big thing.

You can see employees move from PayPal to Google, Yahoo! or LinkedIn. You can see Friendster employees went to Yahoo! and Zazzle, or from Napster to Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. And if you think Google is getting all the good employees out there, there's no question they get their share, but so far, it looks like Facebook is getting a lot of new hires, and nobody's leaving - a boomtime for the social networking giant.

Interestingly, due to Apple's tenure, and the company's rising from the ashes with the return of Steve Jobs, you can see employees that once left the company have returned, having never lost the Mac religion.

Check out the diagrams on Louis' blog. The thoughts Pandora and Box come to mind................

Data portability has been climbing the Tech Buzztrends for awhile, but this BBC note from Sir Tim Berners Lee implies to me that we need to get the privacy horses sorted out before the portability coach is harnessed up:

Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.

"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books," he said.

Sir Tim said his data and web history belonged to him.

He said: "It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return."

This is probably my main interest area in the development of VRM - my data has a value, and I'm damned if the Internet is going to be a system that extracts it from me without some benefit. And long before I am worried about its portability, I want some guarantees as to its privacy. In particular, Sir Tim was worried about Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts - the BBC says that its:

...system offers security benefits which will warn users about potential phishing sites - websites which attempt to con users into handing over personal data.

The advertising system created by Phorm highlights a growing trend for online advertising tools - using personal data and web habits to target advertising.

In our view the best way for the ISP-level Web to go is as a neutral supplier of service, as Sir Tim notes:

"I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control which websites I go to, it doesn't monitor which websites I go to."

More worryingly for us, it looks like our ISP, BT, has signed up for Phorm. The thing is, I am already paying for my ISP connection, I really, really don't want advertising models on a paid-for service.

Well, we objected strenuously to Facebook Beacon, and are now no longer on that site. Rest assured we shall evacuate any provider that tries to foist Beacon, or Phorm, or whatever comes next, on us.

Update - I've just found out that there is an e-petition against Phorm, over here.

Update II - I am seriously enjoying the Slashdot discussion on this

Update III - the FIPR have written a letter to the Information Commissioner alleging this is illegal.

The reason we got interested in VRM initially was a project we were working on awhile ago which we called "white label Identity" - we were getting increasingly worried about just how much the search engines and consumer sites were able to glean from your digital footprint.

The idea was to have a service that knew who you were, so it could authenticate you, and it then represented you - and many others - in your cruisn round the web. So Google et al don't see you, Jo/e Sixpack, with your surfing history and credit card number, but instead see an aggregated identity doing many different things, and when you want to spend money the White Label just says "yup, I'm up for that - charge it"

Anyway, I was reminded of that when I read this paper on "Identity Escrow" - its a much catchier term for what we were looking at (the skill with many of these "old wine" ideas is the correct labelling of the new bottle methinks

Now, at the time, when we tested the idea the two things that came back instantly were:

(i) A lot of people would immediately want to be very certain it wasn't being used for money laundering etc, so the entity running it would probably have to be fairly well regulated to be trusted (or set up in the Cayman Islands - hmmmm...). In Europe anyway, national Telcos emerged as trusted parties for this service, banks at a push, HM Gov (before the disks fiasco), but certainly not dodgy startups.

(ii) At the time (c 3 years ago) the rank and file out there couldn't give a toss about security anyway and wouldn't pay tuppence ha'penny for it - and to be honest, looking at the collective "So?" that has greeted the revelations about Facebook Beacon etc, I'm not sure its much better now

Anyway, we wrote the report, took the money, and went off to fields anew - However, I do note that towards the end of last year and since, there have been increasing rumblings, and the emergence of stuff like VRM makes me think this is an area whose time is coming.