The Internet of Me in 2016
As the many reviews of the past twelve months being published will tell you, 2016 was quite a year. Leaving aside celebrity deaths, Brexit and Donald Trump’s election victory, 2016 was significant for another, more modest, reason — it was the first full year of the Internet of Me forum.
We have covered a lot of ground in that time, from finance to healthcare, identity to politics, privacy to marketing. We’ve spoken to experts, academics and entrepreneurs about the burgeoning personal data economy and their hopes and fears for the future. The ideas and visions that have emerged make for exciting reading.
So this is a round-up of the year on Internet of Me — a chance to catch anything you might have missed and a reminder of highlights worth re-visiting.
It goes without saying that trust is a fundamental requirement of a functioning personal data economy. Back in January we took a look at trust from a somewhat oblique angle — that of the shady characters who ply illicit trade on the Dark Web. What was clear was that, paradoxically, underworld criminals needed a way of doing business that offered their customers the same trust and service as legitimate businesses. All with complete anonymity, of course, although the concern here was mainly to stay out of jail rather than respect consumer privacy.
The prompt for the article came from a talk at the PIE conference in 2015 by Don Thibeau, Chairman and Executive Director of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX), who later gave an interview to Internet of Me.
Here’s what he said about the Dark Web practitioners we can all learn something from: “What they are doing right — their great accomplishment — is that they are creating trust in a zero trust environment. The bad guys have adopted the very same trust mechanisms that we see on Amazon and eBay, such as product samples and consumer reviews.”
Command and control
A two-part interview with internet visionary Doc Searls followed, exploring the fundamental need for individuals to be in control of their own data and how that can enable better consumer relationships for those companies confident enough to respect the shift.
As Doc said: “At the base of the new marketplace here — let’s call it True Loyalty — will be data control on the customers’ side — and standard methods for sharing that data on a need-to-know basis with other parties. Marketing will have a whole new channel once this connection is made.”
2016 was also a big year for developments in ad blocking, something Doc saw as more than just an ongoing battle between consumers and advertisers. “I see ad and tracking blocking as early expressions of a kind of personal agency, and that the bargaining power they provide is far more important than whatever they do to publishing and advertising,” he said.
Ad blocking was a theme picked up by many interviewees, as was the rampant growth of the Internet of Things and the huge implications it has for our personal data. Internet of Me spoke to Dr Phil Windley who believes a shift to greater control and personal agency over data is essential to handle the sheer number of IoT devices in our lives.
Phil, who is an academic and IoT authority as well as co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop, saw a need for devices and systems to become more autonomous: “What I need is communities of devices to be functioning together for a particular purpose. I’ve been working on a system where devices can join communities and communities can discover device capabilities and then the system can allow devices to negotiate with each other in order to achieve some goal for the user.”
For Julian Ranger, founder and chairman of digi.me (which sponsors this forum), the rise in ad blocking signifies an ever-escalating war being fought over our data. He told the Internet of Me how he believes the only way to end this constant conflict is for the businesses handling — and profiting from — our data to leave behind the ‘dark side’ and step into the light. In other words, to stop going behind our backs to surreptitiously scrape and track our data and instead give us control over it and ask for permission to use it.
He said: “I see a true Internet of Me as being where I own and control my data and companies knock on the door to ask for it and I get to control who gets it — that’s all open and transparent. It’s the light side.”
Like Phil Windley, Julian sees this Internet of Me approach as the solution to the problems that come with an expanding Internet of Things, particularly those of ensuring privacy when all of our devices and associated apps are pumping out more and more data about us.
“The Internet of Me enables a more private world but it also enables the Internet of Things, which is the next generation of what’s going to have to come in front of us in terms of data,” he said.
Market forces
The harvesting of data and tracking of online consumer behaviour is clearly a broken model, then, pitting businesses against their customers. Internet of Me spoke to two big hitters from the world of consumer data about what we can expect the personal data economy to evolve into and whether the shift in control will be embraced by big business.
First up was Shawn O’Neal, former VP of global marketing data and analytics at Unilever, who said “it becomes abundantly obvious that companies who want to maintain integrity and trustworthy relationships with individuals will need to find an ongoing, efficient, and secure means of acquiring and using personal data with bounds on the relationship set by the individual”. Permission from the individual, he said, was the key to these more equitable relationships.
Then we heard from Mick Yates who has held senior positions at multinationals including Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, as well as customer loyalty specialists dunnhumby.
His conclusion was that only the individual can bring together all the myriad data sources that build up the complete, rich picture of themselves. So only they can grant access to the detailed personal customer insight businesses need to remain competitive in a data-driven marketplace. Permission, again, was the key to unlocking opportunities.
However, Mick cautioned: “Whether we take advantage of that as individuals is a moot point. Whether companies embrace that rather than try to control what they can and keep it to themselves is another moot point.”
Regulation issue
One of the most significant stories of 2016 was the formal adoption of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in April. This piece of legislation will actually apply in less than 18 months time, with far-reaching consequences for any organisation handling personal data. The GDPR enshrines in law the shift in control and individual agency over personal data that is at the heart of the Internet of Me philosophy, as we said back in April.
The flipside to the extra regulatory burden is the opportunities on offer to build a better-functioning personal data economy and for organisations to differentiate themselves with superior personalised services based on consent. The GDPR has been hailed by every one of our interviewees as an opportunity for innovation and as a framework for a personal data economy that puts the individual in control.
Of course, the UK has since voted to leave the EU — which prompted an article about tech disruption in politics — but that is unlikely to change much in terms of implementing the GDPR. Anyone doing business in the world’s second biggest economy will have to comply.
The last year has seen Internet of Me cover fintech, healthcare, insurance, virtual reality, telecommunications, and a company setting out to do no less than recreate the internet with individual control over data at its heart.
And then, just in case we thought we could anticipate what all this disruptive technological innovation was going to serve up next, we get a story of how digital identity services are being dispensed on the High Street. In a physical shop. By a shoe repair company. Timpson’s ArkHive embraces the UK Government’s Verify programme to offer help to people who might otherwise have difficulty accessing online services.
So to attempt to predict with any certainty what 2017 will hold would be a fool’s errand. What is surely not in dispute, though, is that the amount of data we each create will only continue to grow and with it the value of that data. Taken together, all that information builds a detailed picture of each of us. Not just our search history and shopping behaviour. It is our tastes, our likes and dislikes, from music to movies and food to friends. It is the people in our overlapping social and professional networks, our money, our health, our habits, our movements. It describes so much of who we are and defines our online identities, just as our personalities and circumstances make us more than our name, age and gender.
Our personal data is the raw material for a future that is already under construction.
It is becoming increasingly clear — obvious even — that the only acceptable way for all this data to do anything meaningful is for it to be under our control. Who else can know us as well as ourselves?
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