“Every tweet. Every post. Every search. Every movement. Every action or word pushed to the digital sphere creates a portrait of your identity,” says John C. Havens in his Huffington Post article The Cost of Identity in the Personal Data Economy.
Mark Zuckerberg famously provided his ‘answer’ to our Identity Paradox by saying ‘just be a good person,’ and somehow magic-ly all of our concerns will simply fade away. While the prying eyes of the NSA, (and the Canadian equivalent, CSEC), and of course, permission marketers, developers and countless others scan my data, email, meta-data, google searches, web-history, most private thoughts and secrets, location, photos and phone calls, I am forced to disagree. As my personal data spills across the web, and savvy marketers (and spies) continue to categorize, classify, archetype and pigeonhole me, I simply want to reclaim control over my digital identity.
Discussions around ‘identity data’ tend to focus on privacy. But the issue really is the economics of monetizing our identities currently controlled by a handful of organizations determining the flow of our digital information. In 2010, for example, Facebook earned $1.86 Billion (90% of its revenue) from selling its targeting data to brands, increasing to a projected $4.05 Billion in the following year.
Make no mistake. These are economic transactions. But they aren’t transactions that are negotiated in the traditional sense — the terms of service and policies of these organizations are, in effect, saying, “We’re doing this” and you are free to use the service, or not. Consent doesn’t really enter into the picture.
In their recent piece in the Stanford Law Review, Neil M. Richards and Jonathan H. King elucidate the “identity paradox,” one of the “Three Paradoxes of Big Data” affecting how the current Internet economy functions. They say that our “right to identity originates from the right to free choice about who we are.” And this right is rapidly eroding in our current Internet economy. As Richards and King note in their article:
Such influence over our individual and collective identities risks eroding the vigor and quality of our democracy. If we lack the power to individually say who ‘I am,’ if filters and nudges and personalized recommendations undermine our intellectual choices, we will have become identified but lose our identities as we have defined and cherished them in the past.
That’s one of the reasons why my company Gnito is focused on identity data. We want to deliver control over that data back to the individual. People should be able to decide for themselves how their identity is broadcast, and we as individuals need tools to better manage our data to protect our right to create our identities as we see fit.
Somewhere along the line, somebody hijacked the internet. Technology should enable us to communicate what we want, to whom, whenever we want.
But what is happening, in the hidden sphere, is that same technology is also enabling companies, governments and hackers to know way too much, in searchable, historical databases. We, honest netizens, now just assume they will do anything they can get away with. And we govern ourselves accordingly. “Can this post ever be used against me?” “Could it possibly be interpreted to be subversive?” “Will it ever raise any red flags, among even the most suspicious minds?”
That’s why Gnito is concentrating on this problem.
We are concentrating on doing one thing really well: First, we are finding mutual connections to investors, and getting introduced. And we have a few tricks to follow, including curated and innovative tools to simply manage how to position ourselves in our digital, mobile and web-based world. Easy publishing (and de-publishing) of our identity data throughout our digital, mobile and physical interactions with cross-platform data aggregators.
Please be in touch with us here.
