privacy and web 2.0

From Michael Zimmer:

Why Web 2.0 Will End Your Privacy, from Will Harris at Bit-Tech last week. He’s not saying anything I haven’t said before: social software makes money off of capturing and sharing personal information, which is basically what my MA thesis was about. But he has some nice examples:

Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for ‘cat’, and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between Yahoo and Google, going forward, is that Yahoo wants the web processed by humans and Google wants it done by robots. Google uses algorithms to generate anything to do with its business. Yahoo, with its acquisition of Flickr and Delicious and whatever else is on the horizon, wants people - and social networks - to define how it does business.

He also makes the point, which I’ve also written about before, that the real money here is in aggregating and sharing the data. Take Choicepoint, which collects or buys personal information, assembles it into aggregates (1 per person) and then sells it to corporations and governments. But what’s even more interesting is that people will, more and more, collect this information completely voluntarily, and even enthusiastically.

Witness the rise of self-tracking and monitoring programs like eDiets, allconsuming, the Hacker Diet, last.fm, plus all the regular suspects like online journals and photo albums. If we fiat multimedia ubicomp, we can imagine a world in which every person has an endless data stream associated with themselves: audio, video, words, digital assets. This data stream could be sliced-n-diced an infinite number of ways: by external agencies to identify affinity with marketing profiles (or to interpret a person through the lenses of various micro-demographic identities), but also to assemble collections of assets that then become the equivalent of scrapbooks or memories (witness the ubiquitous wedding website and accompanying powerpoint for the reception).

Enter personal data-mining agents. Future consumer: I want something that will go through my last five years of data and pull out every reference to my new wife, when we met, our first date, the first flickr picture of us together, blog posts from both of us, etc. (Assuming that the couples of the future will be as unbelievably dorky and net-obsessed as most of my friends are today!)

The pitch I’m working on for this conference is precisely about this, about both the self-conscious creation of data streams (and how they are assembled into identity presentation) *and* the creation of group identities / micro-demographics by marketing firms. We have a super rad project concocted.. now to see if we can find funding from some mythical source.