Next month Deborah Schultz will be presenting a keynote called Smart Data: The Struggle to Enhance Customer Experience in a Digital World at the Direct Marketing Association’s upcoming Marketing Analytics Conference. In preparation she bounced the topic off of the VRM mailing list asking how the crowd there would challenge this audience. Naturally, I had a few ideas.
What is your definition of personal?
Over at the Cloud Ramblings blog, John Mathon provides his list of Breakout MegaTrends that will explode in 2015. There’s an entry in there about Personal Cloud rising to prominence. Yay! John and I often see eye to eye on our visions of the near future of computing and Personal Cloud is definitely huge in that future. But it seems that once you get past the name “Personal Cloud,” our visions begin to diverge. I’d like to explain how they diverge, why my vision is better, and beseech John and all the other pundits, analysts and trade journalists out there to adopt a slightly stricter interpretation of what, exactly, constitutes “personal.”
What the Dark Web going mainstream means for you
Need some hacking done? Penetration testing for your web site? Change your college grades? Hack your ex’s email and social media accounts? Now you too can hire a hacker because marketplaces for freelance hackers are no longer the province of the dark web. Today they operate openly alongside the likes of other freelance sites offering more traditional work like graphic design, web site building, or fixing that shutter that’s about to fall off the house. In fact, there are now enough freelance hacker sites that at least one meta site, Hacker For Hire Review, has sprung up to review and rate them. Whether your company operates the legacy or the VRM model, there are a few takeaways here.
Online advertising is the new digital cancer
Many news reports of late have described malware being delivered through advertising networks. But that leaves the impression that the AdTech itself is benign and being hijacked for nefarious purposes. While it may have started out that way, that is definitely not the case today. Kaspersky Labs mention several times in their latest report that the adware has become so aggressive, intrusive, and exhibits such bad behavior that they are now classifying the adware code itself as malicious.
According to AdWeek, global advertising revenues have reached $512B and they forecast declines in revenue growth for 2015. Meanwhile, cybercrime is estimated to cost the global economy $445B annually and that cost is increasing steadily due to advances in technology and in part because victims pay the price over many years so the victim pool grows relentlessly year over year.
Online advertising has escaped its digital Hayflick limits and is spreading out of control. Online advertising is the new digital cancer.
Online privacy as a policy issue
I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Qredo which is a company and a technology that seeks to provide in code many of the online privacy protections we fail to provide (or fail to enforce) in policy and law. While I believe this is a Good Thing and necessary, it doesn’t eliminate the need to fix the policy and legal framework for online privacy. In fact, it makes these things even more urgent.
Identity as a weapon
Writing about the recent phenomenon that is #Gamergate, Kirk Hamilton makes some interesting points about identity:
It makes sense that doxxing—sharing someone’s address and other personal information against their will—is one of the primary instruments wielded in this battle. Doxxers use identity as a weapon, and so much of this conflict is, at its core, about identity. There’s the stated claim that the gamer identity is under attack, and also the pervading sense that this “war” is less about journalistic ethics and more about the murk of entrenched identity politics. Video games have hugely informed our generation’s cultural identity, and so cultural criticism of games feels somehow personal, like we’re the ones being criticized. I get it. I do.
He’s describing a tectonic shift in gamer culture as gaming goes from being largely white, male and young, to being increasingly diverse of race, gender and age. The cultural realignment of broadly defined identity can be expected to set off aftershocks that ripple through adjacent populations and disciplines. In this case, there was an identity quake of about 6 on the Richter scale in the gamer subculture that is rippling through journalism, hardware manufacturing, marketing, law enforcement, and on down to individual people. Among the results is a much wider public perception of the danger one’s personal details represents when in the hands of people you don’t trust.
Gaming is a very geeky subculture. It is assumed by many that the Gamergaters would have no trouble getting anyone’s personal information. Another result then is a social laboratory environment in which we get to see how that assumption affects behavior. Certainly Felicia Day held this belief when she wrote:
I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion that someone on the internet didn’t agree with.
HOW SICK IS THAT?
I have allowed a handful of anonymous people censor me. They have forced me, out of fear, into seeing myself a potential victim.
And that makes me loathe not THEM, but MYSELF.
Within moments of posting this, someone tweeted Felicia’s address.
From its beginnings, the Internet was designed and built functionality first, with security and privacy a very distant second, if at all. SSL was an afterthought. DNSSEC was an afterthought. The original Internet anticipated how functions would work, not how they could be exploited.
Then we built Internet commerce on that shaky foundation and following the same template. There is a strong parallel between the architecture of the commercial web and toxic waste dumping of the late 20th century. Both involved the externalization of costs extracted from a manufacturing process. The manufacturing of things based on atoms resulted in escrowing those costs as time capsules of toxic waste that would become the problem of some future people in return for larger profits today. In the case of bits, widespread failure to implement even basic security to protect personal data generates larger profits today but also creates a situation in which the incremental cost of retrofitting security into large established systems is cost prohibitive. Since that personal data can be used as easily to harm people as to help them, large databases of personal information which lack adequate security are akin to undiscovered pools of toxic waste – cheaper to build today, someone else’s future problem if it is abused.
We are now in the stage where the toxicity of bad security is leaking into the digital groundwater. Those regular reports of massive breaches on high-profile web sites are today’s digital version of yesterday’s cancer clusters. They are the early warning signs that a Security Cleanup Superfund is needed. Except that the maps we draw will have corporate names like Hannaford, Sony, Target and Lowe’s instead of geographic names like Love Canal and Lemon Lane.
We ramping up quickly to build the Internet of Things according to the same old template. We hear about a new “smart” version of an ordinary device just about every day. Just as rapidly we hear about these same devices being hacked, or that the security is so bad that no hacking is required. Since the prevailing model is that the devices are modern Trojan Horses, built first as a portal to your most intimate data and second with the functionality for which you bought it, they represent simultaneously our greatest opportunity and our greatest threat on the network to date.
So when I write about false parallels between the worlds of atoms and bits, or the need to build privacy-protecting or privacy-enhancing architectures, I feel a sense of urgency. I am very aware that the work underway at IIW, NSTIC, OIX and elsewhere in the Identity world potentially powers the world of tomorrow. As Dave Birch says, identity is the new money.
But I’m also keenly aware that identity can be turned into a weapon. I’m generally lonely in that view but the Gamergaters have demonstrated how effective even a small amount of identity information can be as a weapon. People are taking notice. If we embark to build Personal Clouds using the same template we’ve always used, if we assume that privacy and security are legal and policy rather than technical problems, if the individual does not have sovereign ownership of their personal data, then we might as well be honest about what it is we are building. Research into personal data technologies without design goals of privacy, sovereignty and agency, and lacking state of the art security controls would be a digital Manhattan Project. The commercially successful implementation of such a security-free Personal Cloud would be Cyberspace’s atomic bomb, capable of devastating millions of lives at one shot.
So, yeah, identity is the new money. We definitely need to figure out the functionality of identity and the benefits it will bring to the digital world. But the systems must be designed first for security, privacy, and personal sovereignty because it is from these attributes that functionality arises, not the other way around.